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THE 



SCHOOL IN THE HOME 



Talks with Parents and Teachers 



Intensive Child Training 



AV ATBERLE, A.M., D.D. 

PROFESSOR OF APPLIED CHRISTIANITY IN TUFTS COLLEGE 




New York 

MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 

1912 



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Copyright, 1912, by 

MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 

New York 



All rights reserved 



£CLA312094 



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FREELY YE HAVE RECEIVED, FREELY GIVE 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I INTRODUCTION 1 

II LANGUAGE, THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWL- 
EDGE 23 

III MIND FERTILIZATION 51 

IV QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 75 

V THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 99 

VI HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION . . . .119 

VII MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 141 

VIII BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION . . 165 

IX THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND .... 187 



THE 
SCHOOL IN THE HOME 



INTRODUCTION 

That this is not the work of an "educator" 
will be perfectly clear at once to all the mem- 
bers of that fraternity under whose notice this 
book comes. But that does not necessarily pre- 
clude the possibility of clearness of vision nor 
does it invalidate certain obvious facts of expe- 
rience. Education is one of those things in 
which everybody has some experience, and has 
not been reduced to an exact science, if indeed 
it will ever become a science, in any proper 
sense at all. Human life and the human mind 
are constantly undergoing great and funda- 
mental changes. The point of view which pre- 
vails at one period is entirely inadequate for 
another. For example, it is more than fifteen 
years ago since the present writer urged 
upon a large assembly the need for increased 
industrial and technical training in Massachu- 
setts and the reorganization of the state's pro- 

1 



2 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

gramme of education with this and other 
things in view. He had just returned 
from Germany, where he had seen vast 
changes taking place and an entire nation 
being educated into an efficiency which 
was at once wonderful as an exhibition 
of what could be done in this respect and 
striking in its personal and commercial re- 
sults. He saw a village which he had seen 
some years before as a quiet and rural com- 
munity transformed into a vigorous, active, 
commercial center with the world-view of 
commerce and industry. He saw young per- 
sons whom he had known as young country 
children exhibiting all the natural character- 
istics of such a class in Germany (a very dif- 
ferent tiling, by the way, from the similar 
class in America) , changed into alert persons 
whose grasp upon themselves was hardly less 
amazing than the nation's grasp upon its in- 
dustrial self -consciousness and commercial self- 
organization. Both these things so impressed 
him that, knowing the listlessness and waste of 
American life, especially on its educational 
side, coincident with the overwhelming Ameri- 
can passion for education, especially public 
education, he urged the adoption of German 
methods or at least the mastery of the German 



INTRODUCTION 3 

idea with a view to securing like results in 
America. 

Speaking broadly, the address was received 
with mild amusement and the public comment 
which was made upon it was in the nature of 
ridicule that anybody could ever excel Ameri- 
can zeal, American adaptability and American 
genius. One journal suggested that the 
speaker would better stop his foolish aping of 
European ideas and become a real American. 
Since that time, however, the progress of Ger- 
many in the commercial history of the world 
has so arrested attention in America that there 
is now an almost equally stupid and insensate 
acceptance of certain ideas of German origin 
as there was once contemptuous rejection of 
them. The fundamental differences between 
Germany and America and the equally funda- 
mental differences between the social organ- 
ization of the German and the American mind, 
are being ignored in the haste for industrial 
education, so that presently we shall be won- 
dering just why we do not get the results in 
America that they get in Germany. And then 
we shall set about finding the true way. 

It was, however, on the personal side that 
these phenomena made the deepest impression 
upon him. He saw individuals rise in the 



4 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

scale of efficiency, self -organization and self- 
expenditure, which was the most striking ef- 
fect of the whole business. He saw in indi- 
viduals an expansion of mental horizon which 
clearly showed that the juvenile mind can 
work at a pressure, without loss of strength, 
health or diminution of any power or physi- 
cal capacity which is practically unknown in 
America. And he saw these results in per-, 
sons who could not in the slightest degree be 
called unusual, in capability, antecedents or 
opportunity. He saw children not only in 
Germany, but in Belgium, Holland and other 
countries in northern Europe do an amount 
of work and assimilate a fund of knowledge 
at an early age which makes the achievements 
of the average school child in America seem 
foolishness and waste. He resolved to try ex- 
periments in this direction himself and for 
many years now has been in the course of his 
vocation as a preacher and pastor also teaching 
young people from very young children to 
students in college in almost all branches re- 
quired for admission to American colleges. 
The results have been surprising beyond 
words. These young people, almost seventy 
in number, have responded to an intensive 
treatment in instruction and guidance, in a 
way which shows that the waste in the aver- 



INTRODUCTION 5 

age American child's life is something simply 
astounding. It proves to him beyond all 
doubt, that on the side of personal efficiency, 
American education is one of the most waste- 
ful things in the whole American organization 
of life. It seems to prove that from three to 
five years of life are lost to American young 
people, simply because they are not trained 
for large results in a large way and required 
to undertake tasks commensurate with their 
abilities. It seems to show that while there 
are undoubted differences in children arising 
from their antecedents, intellectual ancestry 
and environment, on the whole, these are neg- 
ligible in the final result if you get a right 
method and make a large enough demand and 
arouse the necessary interest and exert the re- 
quired force to get the result. This is a loss 
of years of life, the amount of which is be- 
yond computation. It takes years out of the 
life of people, makes waste in productiveness, 
happiness and effectiveness in mature life, 
which one, who has not thought the matter 
through, would hardly imagine to be the case. 
The evidence of the truth of this indictment 
of our public education can be had on the 
most casual inquiry. Ask any well-informed 
parent about his children's progress in school 
and you will get at once a cry of discontent 



6 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

and helpless protest. Such protests, in the 
shape of letters of inquiry about the subject- 
matter of this book, are in my possession by 
the hundreds. They come from all sorts of 
people, from college professors to the street 
laborers. They come from persons in all 
walks of life, from rich men and poor men. 
But all these people have one element in com- 
mon. They are interested in the intellectual 
growth and development of their children and 
are anxious to send out into the world effec- 
tive and thoroughly equipped persons. Some- 
times the interest arises from the remem- 
brance of privileges which the parents 
themselves did not enjoy. Sometimes it arises 
from the consciousness of the neglect of pa- 
rental duty in the matter of the children's edu- 
cation. Sometimes it is the sincere and help- 
less anxiety arising from the plain evidence, 
daily before the parents, that the young peo- 
ple are not only not making any real progress 
but are forming habits which either mean a 
fearful task to overcome in the future or a 
hopeless handicap in the race of life. The 
one thing about them all is, that they see with 
more or less clearness that the education on 
which we spend so much money and about 
which we boast so loudly and about which we 
are in such deadly earnest as communities and 



INTRODUCTION 7, 

so indifferent as individuals, is a fearfully 
wasteful and costly process. And in noth- 
ing more costly than in the loss to the mental 
habits and personal intellectual ideals of the 
young people themselves. We could possibly 
endure it if it did no good. But it does not 
stop there; it is demoralizing the mental habits 
of the nation. 

If further testimony is necessary, ask any 
mature and capable teacher who has watched 
the progress of the public schools in the last 
twenty years. The teacher so addressed will 
tell you in plain terms, that while the teachers 
are doing the best they can under the circum- 
stances, the results are steadily more discour- 
aging, if any high and thorough standard is 
taken into consideration. He will tell you 
that the capacity for steady and sustained 
thought on the part of pupils seems to grow 
less instead of more. He will tell you that 
the disposition to avoid anything difficult and 
calling for effort, especially disagreeable ef- 
fort, grows stronger and that committees and 
faculties alike are being forced to yield to this 
disposition, thus controlling public education. 
Rare is the community that will sustain any 
public superintendent or school committee in 
any move that will raise the standard and 
make attainment of graduation, that ignis 



8 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

fatuus of our educational system, more diffi- 
cult. The quality of some of the work ac- 
cepted toward a high school degree, for 
example, in some of the cities in Massachu- 
setts, is simply ludicrous. A high school di- 
ploma may mean that the child receiving it 
has had some real contact with a strictly intel- 
lectual process. But for the most part it does 
not mean anything of the sort. This does not 
require any proof. Simple inquiry anywhere 
will reveal it as a fact. 

Following this line one step higher up, we 
come to college education. The well-known 
discontent now being frankly acknowledged 
by the presidents of all American colleges 
with the intellectual caliber of their graduates 
is the logical outcome of a process which be- 
gins in the lowest grades. That need not be 
discussed here. But a result in American 
life arising from it may be considered in a 
few paragraphs. The decline in respect for 
scholarship, especially scholarship which has 
nothing to do with commercial productive- 
ness, is an effect in American life the full 
meaning of which many persons do not seem 
to comprehend very clearly. It means a 
lower type of civilization, it means a lower 
ideal of life and it means a substantial sur- 
render of the permanent agencies of human 



INTRODUCTION 9 

happiness, because it is taking out of the 
life of the nation the one thing which makes 
more for happiness than any other single ele- 
ment, namely, capable self -organization. One 
needs only to look about and observe the vast 
number of persons who, reaching middle life, 
have no momentum in any direction. They 
seem to exist from day to day. They have 
no vital interests, no mental reserves which 
make it possible for them to live, except by 
constant dynamic injections of excitement or 
amusement from without. Nothing shows 
this more than the amusements which are most 
flourishing. To ask a group of people to 
spend an evening together, with only their 
brain power, their varied intellectual interests, 
to entertain them and the comparison of their 
aims and purposes and experiences to furnish 
pleasure, is to risk an evening of disastrous 
boredom for almost everybody involved. 
This also is a common knowledge. Does it not 
sometimes impress all of us to what idiotic 
things, as well-bred people and as persons who 
are supposed to have had some contact with 
the intellectual treasures of the world, I mean 
now its exciting and interesting treasures of 
which there are multitudes, we give ourselves? 
And have we not often gone home, glad 
enough to have seen our friends, but thor- 



10 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

oughly ashamed of the manner in which we 
spent our time and wondering just what the 
reason is we keep on doing these things in this 
way? 

Now the fact is, this is simply the working 
out of the thing which has its roots far back 
in the earlier stages of education. The only 
things intensive about American life at the 
present moment are amusement and money- 
making. In these, undoubtedly, we are in 
fearful earnest. A baseball game is a joy- 
ous and delightsome sight, especially if it is 
a good game. But almost any baseball game 
is good enough. But the reflection that 
thousands of people, during the most charm- 
ing and delightful season of the year go, day 
after day, to see other people play and for 
hours do absolutely nothing themselves, but 
see other people doing things, is one of the 
most curious commentaries on contemporary 
American life. Now children would never do 
this. They want to play themselves and they 
do. But after they have gone through the 
American educational mill — school, college 
and the rest — they are content to sit and sit 
and sit, by thousands, for hours and hours and 
hours and do nothing but see other people 
play! We call ourselves an energetic people! 
The claim is pure foolishness in the light of 



INTRODUCTION 11 

the way in which we take our amusements, the 
thousands simply doing nothing, exercising 
no faculties of their own of mind or body and 
adding absolutely nothing (but fat) to their 
own equipment for the fuller years of life. 
There is a healthy reaction coming in this mat- 
ter of which we see signs. But for the most 
part this is descriptive of American life in 
this phase. Commercially, the same phenome- 
non is most conspicuous. The mad race for 
money, without capacity to enjoy it properly, 
when secured, is still our outstanding charac- 
teristic. But even here, it must be confessed 
that the efficiency which our commerce displays 
is hardly the efficiency which commands admi- 
ration. It still has too much the aspect which 
makes moral scrutiny a source of uneasiness 
and has taken as its most recent note the wide- 
spread demand for the criminal prosecution 
of our captains of industry. But this is a 
subject by itself. 

Now the influence of all this upon the per- 
sonal life and character is perfectly plain. 
This not being a moral treatise, that phase 
of the matter will not be discussed here. 
Enough to say that the final result is a lower 
type of civilization, lessened respect for the 
fine and permanent things of life, an idealism 
that is bounded by the stock exchange or the 



12 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

musical comedy, a culture that in spite of no- 
table exceptions and great advances, rests 
upon private initiative almost exclusively and 
this often collaborated with the criminal inter- 
ests just alluded to. The place where all this 
is to be combated is in the sphere of child 
training. It is in the creation of mental hab- 
its, mental outlook and mental interests, 
which will automatically make this type of de- 
velopment impossible. It is in a programme 
of intensive development for young children 
which will make them immune from the tend- 
encies which not only destroy their best 
capacities, but which make it possible for them 
to go through the world never knowing what 
they have missed and what kind of a world it 
actually is. There must be a mind fertiliza- 
tion, which is, at the same time, a sterilization 
against other things. There must be the 
arousing of interests which, by their very fire 
and picturesqueness and enjoyment, will 
make the rest seem tame and listless. There 
must be such a linkage of real and substantial 
knowledge and the process of gaining it, with 
delight and pleasure, as will make the sense- 
less and idiotic things offered to rational be- 
ings for amusement seem an insult to the 
mind. There must be such a programme and 
it must be begun in the home, before the 



INTRODUCTION 13 

school life begins, which will assimilate natu- 
rally the best things offered in the school and 
by natural repulsion leave the rest. There 
must be such a cooperation between the home 
and the school as will secure the continuous 
education of parents in the education of their 
children, that will make for the continuous 
enrichment of the intellectual life of the house- 
hold and will at the same time steadily create 
new interests, as new knowledge and new ex- 
periences are brought into the fellowship of 
parents and children. 

So much for the actual conditions. Now 
for some concrete examples of what happened. 
The earliest experiments were made in my 
own family of four children, now aged, re- 
spectively, a girl of seventeen, a boy sixteen, 
a girl twelve and a boy ten. At the time these 
plans began to go into operation the two 
younger children were not born and there be- 
ing but seventeen months between the two 
eldest, the plan admitted of treating both ex- 
actly alike. These two were admitted to 
RadclifFe and Harvard colleges, the girl be- 
ing fifteen and the boy thirteen and a half. 
Their examination papers were of average, 
possibly slightly above average excellence, 
betraying nothing unusual and especially 
nothing that indicated "prodigies." They 



14 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

had simply arrived several years earlier than is 
usual. Two years of their college life have 
passed and their standing in college is, with an 
occasional exception, in the honor list. Both 
have pursued the maximum amount of work 
permitted by the colleges, the boy being al- 
lowed to take six courses at Harvard, the girl 
only five at Radcliffe. They are in good 
health and nothing unusual has happened. 
No vital relation which ought to come with 
college life, associations or interests, has been 
denied them and they have secured all that 
could be expected out of their college life. 
In fact, rather more as I should judge. I 
can see no reason for altering the course with 
the two younger children, both of whom are in 
the Cambridge High and Latin School and 
are beginning third year work. They will 
take college examinations and probably be 
admitted at about the same ages as their older 
brother and sister. There has been no crowd- 
ing. They are in absolutely perfect health 
judged by ordinary standards. They are not 
children of exceptional ability. They have 
been subjects of exceptional oversight and 
care, both as to studies and health. If this re- 
sult had been secured with one child, the usual 
plea of an "unusual child" might possibly be 



INTRODUCTION 15 

raised. But it is unthinkable that there 
should be four ''prodigies" in one family! As 
a matter of fact, all such talk is absurd. The 
difference is one of method, parental interest 
and care. 

Another case from what might be called 
the opposite social pole is that of a youth whose 
father was a street laborer with whom I be- 
came acquainted because he worked in front 
of my house and I got into the habit of speak- 
ing with him as I passed out of my gate in the 
morning. One day he confided to me his 
anxiety about his boy in the grammar school, 
who was not doing well. I called at the school, 
got acquainted with the boy, his habits and 
his possibilities. He was about to be denied 
promotion for neglect of his work and bad 
behavior. I got him interested in me, planned 
his work for the following summer, gave up 
a part of my vacation to see that he did it, 
instructed his parents as to my requirements 
for study and habits, and the following Sep- 
tember he took admissions for the high school 
into which he was admitted, in which he made 
an excellent record, from which he passed into 
a law school and is now a successful practicing 
lawyer. His record in the law school was ex- 
cellent. He has since developed literary 



16 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

habits and will be a useful and effective men> 
ber of his profession. And he is a gentle- 
man! 

Still another case is that of a girl in whom 
I became interested when she was ten. Her 
parents, when I indicated what I thought she 
might do, strongly deprecated any attempt 
to get her to college and advised me to give 
the attention to an older sister. They gave 
absolutely no aid in the matter. But the girl 
became interested, applied herself, developed 
remarkable aptitude for making quick infer- 
ences and utilizing her knowledge, entered 
high school, made a good record and gradu- 
ated in the first twenty in her class in college, 
Her whole career was a struggle and against 
an absolutely hostile environment, since the do- 
mestic life of the home was not happy and the 
girl got no assistance there. She is now a 
useful and successful teacher. 

An unusual case was that of a boy who had 
some rather severe physical infirmities, but 
whose interest being aroused, set to work to 
overcome these and other natural handicaps. 
I got into touch with him when he was twelve. 
Between that age and seventeen he did more 
work than most children do between begin- 
ning school and twenty. He also made a 
good college record, which might have been 



INTRODUCTION 17 

brilliant if he had not had to earn a part of 
his living at the same time. This boy also is 
in the law and is known among his associates 
as a "student," a man whose opinions are val- 
ued because of his habits of application and 
thoroughness. 

One further case will suffice. It was the 
case of a girl whom I began to know when 
she was about twelve. At that time she was 
supposed to be "impossible" from the stand- 
point of study. A little careful guidance, 
stimulation on the side of the interests which 
knowledge properly applied arouses, made a 
transformation which was little short of won- 
derful. The need for earning her livelihood 
took her prematurely out of school, but she 
has developed literary skill and knowledge 
and writes beautifully and earns a suitable in- 
come with her pen. I have no doubt whatever 
that this child, had she come under wise guid- 
ance at an early age, would have made a 
brilliant and remarkable figure. 

More recently, I advised a mother with her 
small child of four to resist the temptation 
to put him into the school but to give him her 
own attention. I urged his father to take, as 
I did, his meal times as periods for discussion, 
for fertilization, for the interesting of his child 
in the things of the mind. The result has 



18 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

been overwhelming to the parents in the rapid 
assimilation of a knowledge of history, of some 
forms of mathematics and a variety of other 
things usually met by children in the high 
school period, and that child would at this mo- 
ment, after two years of such work, find the 
fifth, or even the sixth, grade stupid and a 
bore. Imagine a child that has been told the 
tales of Shakespeare and interested in the plots 
and counterplots of the great plays, told 
the thrilling stories of Greek history and able 
to talk about them on the factual side, being 
kept in a fifth grade reader ! 

Now in all these cases there was nothing 
abstruse, terrifying or otherwise beyond 
the reach of the average parent. In fact, the 
whole thing turned upon the fidelity of the 
parents, quite as much as upon that of the 
children when the children were young. But 
in cases some of which are cited above, even 
with conditions wholly unfavorable, children 
were enabled to do three and four times the 
work, in a third or half the time usually con- 
sumed by school children. To be sure, in all 
these cases a little work was kept up through- 
out the long vacation, one of the absurdities 
of American life. These children did not for 
twelve long weeks absolutely forget that they 
had brains, which must work and which must 



INTRODUCTION 19 

be kept active in developing habits of obser- 
vation, attention and self-control. 

Now it is impossible to assume that all these 
children had some unusual qualities not com- 
mon to most children. In most cases they 
had good health. Of course you cannot get 
full work from a sick child. Of course they 
had to keep regular hours and forego a good 
deal of what is called the social life of young 
people. But in this, as in all other things, a 
choice has to be made. It is a question of 
what one desires most. Young people cannot 
go out to parties and dance half the night and 
have their brains and bodies in condition for 
capable and effective work the next day. 
They cannot have their minds filled with a 
vast variety of "social" nonsense and still 
keep it fresh for habitation by higher things. 
When that fact is clearly brought to the at- 
tention of a young person and the right choice 
is made, half the battle is won. But that also 
is another question. 

The methods or rather the principles, which 
have governed in all these cases were the same. 
They are indicated not precisely, but gener- 
ally, in the following chapters. The first 
thing to be secured is the conviction on the 
part of parents and others who have young 
children in charge, that there is capacity and 



20 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

power in the child, which only needs to be de- 
veloped, and then to take the means by which 
that development can be secured. Naturally 
there is no arbitrary method. But the re- 
marks made in the succeeding chapters will 
indicate about what happened and where the 
line of advance starts. There are in these 
histories elements Which cannot of course be 
made public but which I wish to assure my 
readers if they knew they would never have 
another contented minute with the present 
slipshod, listless and machine methods by 
which the thousands of our children are given 
what is called their "education." The pa- 
rental attitude, and next to that the teacher's 
attitude toward the higher things of the mind, 
is of paramount importance especially in 
young children. The often contemptuous in- 
difference with which mature people treat the 
presence of children in their habits, manners 
and conversation is to me one of the paralyz- 
ing wonders of contemporary life. This is 
especially observable in matters of speech and 
the use of the mother tongue. But it is 
hardly less true in other important matters. 

Of course this is not academic and peda* 
gogical. As stated, this is not the work of an 
"educator." It may interest persons whc 
have an academic interest in this matter, that 



INTRODUCTION 21 

I could, if it had been worth while, have 
placed abundant footnotes and references 
for many things, in connection with the ideas 
which are laid down in the chapters following. 
Perhaps some time later, I shall write a small 
book with that purpose specifically in mind. 
But as this is manifestly a "tendenz-schrift" 
and has in view the purpose of arousement of 
interest in the thing discussed, the academic 
discussion of the problem may well be left out. 
I propose also later to publish a small book, 
in which a programme is particularly indicated 
which may not be without its uses. But for 
the present I wish merely to secure assent to 
certain ideas, which I believe generally ac- 
cepted and the practice of the achievement of 
which, widely adopted, will save from three to 
five years of school life for the ordinary child 
and add immeasurably to the happiness, use- 
fulness and effective self -direction of many 
human beings. 



I have no remembrance of the time when I began 
to learn Greek. I have been told that it was when I 
was three years old. My earliest recollection on the 
subject is that of committing to memory what my 
father termed vocables, being lists of common Greek 
words with their signification in English which he 
wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar until some 
years later I learned no more than the inflections of 
nouns and verbs, but after a course of vocables pro- 
ceeded at once to translation ; and I faintly remember 
going through iEsop's Fables, the first Greek book 
which I read. The Anabasis, which I remember bet- 
ter, was the second. I learnt no Latin till my eighth 
year. At that time I had read under my father's 
tuition a number of Greek prose authors among 
whom I remember, the whole of Herodotus and of 
Xenophon's Cyropaedia and Memorials of Socrates ; 
some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes 
Laertius ; part of Lucian and Isocrates Ad Demoni- 
cum and Ad Nicoclem. 

— John Stuart Mill. Autobiography. 



II 

LANGUAGE THE INSTRUMENT OF 
KNOWLEDGE 

Language is the tool by which all knowl- 
edge is acquired. There are persons who can 
make themselves understood and can convey 
ideas by signs and motions of various kinds, 
but the usual medium for conveying ideas is 
language. The earliest form in which lan- 
guage begins to assert its influence upon the 
human mind is in the spoken tongue. It is 
hardly an accident that we speak of the 
"mother" tongue. It is in the home that the 
most durable habits of speech are acquired 
and generally speaking it is in the home that 
whatever style develops in mature life has 
its origin. But it is not merely the fact that 
language and speech as its oral form is the 
effective and most powerful tool of knowl- 
edge; it also affects a great many other 
things. It is not enough that a word be 
spoken. It makes a great deal of difference 
how it is spoken. The proper vocalization of 
words has an effect upon children which is 
often, one may say generally, overlooked. 

23 



24 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

Almost everybody is fond of repeating the 
baby's efforts to talk and "baby talk" lingers 
in many homes an innocent but costly pleas- 
ure, for the parents and the children alike. 
There are many persons of mature age at this 
moment who will never pronounce certain 
words properly, since they became accustomed 
to a false pronunciation in childhood, because 
somebody thought it was "cute." There are 
many persons who will never get over certain 
false associations of ideas, because somebody 
thought it was very amusing and funny to see 
the child mixing up things in such a beauti- 
fully childlike way! 

Let me call attention to a contrast at this 
point which may suggest what this particular 
chapter has to explain. What parent, if he 
discovered some physical disability in the 
speech of a young child which meant imper- 
fect vocalization, like lisping, for example, or 
stuttering, would not make haste to employ 
every possible means to secure the early cor- 
rection of the evil? Or again, suppose some 
father discovered that his child had a mal- 
formation of one or both feet, which meant, if 
unattended to, that the child would never walk 
straight or stand erect? Can we imagine that 
this defect would be ignored, glossed over and 
forgotten simply because for the moment it 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 25 

caused no discomfort or involved no pain? 
Or once again, let us suppose that parents 
found out that the sight of a child was im- 
paired and that the prompt attention of some 
specialist in this department meant the com- 
plete restoration of sight, by wise observing 
of the defect and the careful training and 
guiding of the eyes from misuse and misdi- 
rection. Is it thinkable, in any rational house- 
hold, that this matter would be left without 
attention and without the employment of 
every possible means to secure the best results 
for correct sight and sound, healthy eyes? To 
ask all these questions is to answer them. The 
great advance in America, of supervision in 
the public schools and elsewhere of children 
in these respects shows how strong has become 
the appreciation of the importance of dealing 
with these and all defects promptly and at 
the earliest period possible. 

Pass now from the region of physical devel- 
opment into the region of the mental life and 
contrast the method of procedure. A child 
makes, through undeveloped organs, some 
funny mistake in the vocalization of a word. 
Everybody laughs and the child is promptly 
encouraged to make the same mistake over 
again. Not only is the child deceived as to 
the fact concerning that particular thing, but 



26 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

its ears are misled at the same time. In that 
laugh, left without any further attention, 
three things happened. The child was de- 
ceived about the thing itself, interpreting the 
laugh as approval; the ears of the child were 
misled, interpreting the sound it heard as a cor- 
rect one and therefore to be repeated in that 
connection, and there was integrated into the 
mind of the child an error which either had 
to remain there or later be expelled by a spe- 
cial process. A very large fraction of the 
entire process of what we call elementary edu- 
cation is taken up in this business of the ex- 
pulsion of errors which have been carelessly 
permitted to become integrated in the minds 
of children. Let this process now go on for 
several years. And by and by, you have just 
what you find in the vast majority of the chil- 
dren who come to a public school, a mass of 
thoroughly false ideas and habits about speech, 
vocalization and language generally and what 
is even more disastrous the feeling that proper 
speech, careful vocalization and accuracy in 
diction are something unusual, peculiar if not 
wholly undesirable. Note the result in almost 
any schoolroom, when a child gifted in ac- 
curate speech, rises, and you will see either 
amazement that such a thing is possible and 
wonderment at just what it all means, or hi- 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 27 

larious amusement over what seems to them, 
ignorance of the real truth, mannerism in talk- 
ing. 

Nor is this attitude confined to the school. 
Let a man be careful and precise, even though 
not bookish, in his habits of speech in any 
general assembly of men and he is generally 
put down as a "grind" or some sort of a person 
who must be in "intellectual pursuits." There 
seems almost to be a demand for a corrupted 
use of the language to convince people that 
you are "practical" and "in it" and otherwise 
en rapport with the things of the age. In 
fact, not to use the slang of the time, indi- 
cates to the vast majority of your fellows that 
somehow you do not belong to the "crowd." 
An ordinary conversation in any public place 
would be unintelligible to a man who had ac- 
quired English only from books, in another 
land, because so infused with technical slang 
of one kind and another which is intelligible 
only in our country. Coming across the 
ocean one winter, I became acquainted with 
a German commercial agent, who had tran- 
scribed five hundred and sixty such expres- 
sions and attached definitions and examples of 
their usage to the same, in order to make him- 
self agreeable to his business associates on 
this side of the water! He had found that 



28 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

the mastery of this corruption of the English 
tongue was a commercial asset which he could 
not neglect. Read the newspaper account of 
a ball game or in fact any one of the popular 
American sports and you will find yourself at 
once in a terra incognita unless you happen to 
be familiar with the particular sport of which 
you are reading. I see my reader smile as 
he reads this. But it is no smiling matter 
for his boy or girl when he strikes his English 
work in the high school or a college admission 
paper! Nor is it a smiling matter for him 
when the report of failure comes from the col- 
lege office! 

The point, at this stage, which I wish to 
make is, that from the earliest moment we 
seem to make every provision possible for per- 
fection of the physical structure in which the 
mind operates and carelessly leave till we are 
forced to deal with it, the habits and activities 
of the mind itself. "But what do you want 
me to do with my baby?" says some irate man 
who thinks I am going to demand a philo- 
sophical thesis from the baby in its cradle. 
This is what I want him to do. If he sees a de- 
fective eye I want him to get it mended. If 
he sees a defective word I want that mended, 
too. If he sees a foot malformed, I want him 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 29 

to employ his time and strength and money to 
see that it is corrected. If he sees a false 
habit of speech developing" and a false note 
being integrated into the mentality of his child, 
I want him to correct that too. When one 
of my own children was small I noticed a 
certain tendency to make bad work of a cer- 
tain combination of consonants. Thereafter 
daily, for several weeks, as a playful exercise 
with this baby, I repeated in its ear the proper 
vocalization of that combination and presently 
the confusion disappeared. Left alone, that 
habit would have become fixed. It would 
have affected the spelling of that particular 
combination as it appeared in words. It 
would have confused the eye every time it 
saw them, because it would have been inhar- 
monious with the sound which lingered in the 
ears and which had been made domiciliary in 
the tongue. That slight defect might have 
operated for confusion, for distress and for 
blunder in a hundred different ways of which 
I do not even know. But simply lisping into 
the baby's ear daily, as a matter of playful 
intercourse, the thing was eliminated. Apply 
that principle to the use of words. Apply it 
to habits of correct speech and the use and 
power of approach to the mother tongue in 



30 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

the ordinary child in the first three or four 
years of life and it will produce something 
which will seem like a dream. 

You observe, of course, that this training 
begins not with the child but with the person 
or persons who have the child in charge. In 
general, it means the parents. But most par- 
ents never think of this matter at all and I 
have often been upbraided by indignant per- 
sons who said I was destroying the childhood 
of my children, because I did not let them 
master all sorts of false notions about their 
mother tongue. Because I did not let their 
mistakes go uncorrected, because I refused to 
use slang with them in the formative period of 
their lives, because I insisted that when they 
misused a word or used a false order of words, 
they should instantly correct both, it was said 
I was making an unnatural life for the chil- 
dren. They said it was unnatural for chil- 
dren to do these things. They might as well 
have insisted that it was unnatural and wrong 
to correct defective vision or to operate on a 
clubfoot ! 

Now what makes all this important is what 
comes of it. Language as I have said is the 
tool of knowledge. It is the instrument by 
which we gain and garner information, by 
which we coordinate what we know and make 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 31 

inferences and express results. But if you 
blunt the tool, not to say destroy it, before 
you begin to use it, how are you ever to get 
knowledge in any proper or real sense? 
Everything depends upon this tool. The 
mastery of a proper use of the mother tongue 
is the first and last requisite of sound and ex- 
tensive mental development. Language is 
the key to everything that pertains to human 
life. Once get a language and you have the 
key to manners, civilization, habits, customs, 
history and all the complex and fascinating 
story of humanity. Because you get all these 
things by reading about them, and to read 
you must know the language and you must 
know it accurately and extensively and be able 
to follow the masters of it who have embodied 
their great ideas in literature. That process 
begins almost at the cradle. It begins by cul- 
tivating accuracy and skill in the use of the 
tongue. It begins by striking at and out, 
every false thing, the moment it appears. 
Isn't it as important to prevent the malforma- 
tion of the mind, as the malformation of a 
foot? Isn't it just as necessary to prevent 
false use of the thinking as of the seeing 
power ? x 

i Emerson has told in his own excellent way what the signifi- 
cance of language is in matters beyond even those which I 



32 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

Perhaps I may be permitted, at this point, 
to digress a little and say a word on the subject 
of the study of other languages than the 
mother tongue. One of the things that in- 
terested me greatly in the Low Countries was 
the facility with which children spoke four 
or five languages. I used occasionally to get 
children to sit down and say the same thing for 
me in several languages, to see whether they 
made the shadings incident to varying racial 
development and interest, and I was often sur- 
prised to see the skill, with which the thing 
was done. Now of course in the Low Coun- 
tries, the intermixture of races makes it ab- 
solutely necessary for every child to master 
several languages in order to do business with 
the contemporary life around it. But what 
struck me most was that the cross- fertiliza- 
tion of thought, produced by this inter-lingual 
development, was even more important than 
the thing itself. It convinced me that linguis- 
tic study has in it more power for the devel- 
opment of mental force and freedom than any 

have already indicated. He says: "Language is made up of 
the spoils of all actions, trades, arts, games of men. Every 
word is a metaphor borrowed from some natural or mechanical, 
agricultural or nautical process. The poorest speaker is like 
the Indian dressed in a robe furnished by half a dozen ani- 
mals. It is like our marble foot-slab made up of countless 
shells and exuviae of a foreign world." 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 33 

other kind of study. It convinced me that 
the decline of the classics in America, Greek 
and Latin, on the score that they were not 
"practical," is a species of foolishness, which 
some day we shall greatly deplore and regret 
having permitted the driving out of our high 
schools and colleges, the requirements along 
these lines. I am not now arguing that 
Greek shall be made compulsory. I am argu- 
ing, that those parents who yield to the fool- 
ish clamor against the classics, on the ground 
that they are not practical, do not know what 
they are doing. I believe that the reaction upon 
the English tongue and its comprehension, the 
reaction upon the use of the vernacular itself 
for the commonest uses of life and, especially, 
for the enjoyment of literature, is a compen- 
sation from classical study, which is the most 
practical thing possible in the way of educa- 
tion. Of course it is not as easy as typewrit- 
ing and stenography! But is typewriting 
education? I believe in some high schools, it 
counts as much as Greek for a high school 
diploma! What a valuable document that 
sheet must be in such cases ! 

The use of the mother tongue is the most 
important factor of the whole educational 
process. It is the means, by which entrance is 
made into the vast world of books. Once that 



34 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

world is entered, the novice knowing" his tool 
and having the tool properly edged and sharp- 
ened, he is brought at once into contact, possi- 
ble in no other way, with the vast stores of 
knowledge. And observe, when you have 
trained a child in good English and prevented 
it from learning a great mass of bad English, 
when you have spent its earliest years familiar- 
izing it with a correct and extensive vocabu- 
lary, you have given it access to a great many 
things from which the other process automat- 
ically excludes it. Now there are great 
treasures in the libraries, which even young 
children would enjoy if they only had the tool 
by which they could use them. But their 
"club" minds having been neglected, having 
been encouraged because it was "cute" and 
"pretty" and ministered to the vanity and 
indolence of the parents, to do nothing about 
it, to misuse, misunderstand or absolutely to 
know nothing- at all of many common things, 
they are automatically excluded from this 
world. That means the delimitation of their 
activities, almost from the start. Sometimes 
it means a permanent exclusion from some of 
the choicest delights of life. For taste, like 
everything else develops early, and taste in lit- 
erature and knowledge and things intellectual 
requires very careful and exacting attention 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 35 

in the early stages. Who does not recall the 
hatred for some branches which was bred in 
him by the stupid blundering person who was 
their titular representative? I had myself ex- 
actly this experience with mathematics, till 
I struck a fascinating creature, who made 
geometry seem like poetry and who talked 
about algebra as though he were describing 
foreign travel! If anybody doubts this as a 
possibility let him read one of Gladstone's 
budget speeches, especially that particular one, 
in which he links Greek history and classical 
knowledge and the whole romance of Greek 
literature with a tax on raisins! The same 
thing can be done with almost any branch of 
knowledge, if there is the skill, the zest and 
the industry and the love of it to do it. It 
can be generated in almost any child for almost 
any subject. 

Now this is in no wise a technical or involved 
matter at all. It requires on the part of 
parents and teachers and the custodians of 
young life generally, interest and care, in 
watching the process of the formation of the 
habits of speech and the use of words. It 
requires that the persons named shall them- 
selves keep correct habits, in the presence of 
their children. It demands that when an error 
appears, it shall promptly be supplanted by 



36 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

the corresponding correct usage. In practice 
this will be found to be really a very enjoy^ 
able process. There is hardly any pleasure 
comparable to the pleasure of seeing the mind 
of a child grow. And there is a special 
pleasure, in seeing it grow beautifully and 
develop satisfactorily in every respect, and 
perhaps the most outstanding and interesting 
manifestation of such sound growth and de- 
velopment is the evidence that ideas are coming 
into existence naturally and accurately. One 
who does these things, will have the same sen- 
sations, only much more delightful, in hear- 
ing his child speak a difficult word properly, 
that he has when it walks across the room the 
first time without assistance. Every tumble 
while the child is learning to walk, hurries 
somebody to the assistance of the little one. 
What if every inaccurate speech, every tumble 
of the mind, every false accent and every ab- 
surdity which now only provokes amusement 
or laughter, were promptly made the subject 
of correction and strengthening! Why is not 
one process as reasonable as the other? Is it 
absolutely necessary to let children, in the in- 
terest of "childhood," blunder along in the use 
of the mother tongue without guidance and 
with nothing to strengthen the taste or train 
the ear in the right things? Is that what 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 37 

makes "childhood" interesting? If people 
would only reflect that the neglect of these 
things is the source of the fearful depression 
of children in later school years, when they 
flounder around in their work largely because 
they have not the linguistic resources to under- 
stand what their instructors are talking about, 
there would soon be given almost as much at- 
tention to the training of the mind as the cor- 
rection of a clubfoot. 

Neglect of the programme which I have 
here described, breeds often permanent defects 
in the whole mental structure. And these 
permanent defects, being allied to the habitual 
expression of ideas and the organization of 
thought, are among the most costly defects 
which can afflict any human being, because 
the real life of mankind is in its mental con- 
ceptions. Persons having a large experience 
of life, are unanimous in the belief that most 
persons who make a failure of life do so be- 
cause they are not able to think clearly or 
consecutively about anything. They often 
exhibit unusual cleverness and unusual ca- 
pacity in certain directions, but seem to be un- 
able to coordinate this exceptional talent or 
capacity with the other faculties in such a way 
as to make it effective for use. I know no 
instrument that so tends to clarify thought 



38 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

as a keen linguistic sense. By its very nature 
it creates shadings and attitudes and percep- 
tions which operate for the sharpening of the 
mind to distinctions; and what is clearness of 
thought but the ability to make accurate dis- 
tinctions readily and habitually? This can 
readily be observed in its formative processes 
in very young children. In things physical, 
where differences of structure are obvious, the 
differentiations are quickly and usually clearly 
made. But when it comes to the same process, 
as regards words and language, it is passed 
by unnoticed and there is integrated into the 
child's mind a false distinction which by its 
presence complicates and obscures every other 
distinction to which it is related. And this 
process goes on with increasing, accelerating 
force till what is false is mistaken for what is 
true and the capacity for acquiring nice shad- 
ings of thought is lost almost before the think- 
ing power has begun to get into motion. 
Many educated men have told me, indeed one 
of the most erudite college professors in this 
country told me recently that failure to give 
him this attention had made it impossible for 
him to write a paragraph without a dictionary 
at his side. It was not, he said, that he did not 
know how to spell nor that he did not use cer- 
tain words and certain classes of words prop- 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 39 

erly as a rule, but that he found himself in a 
region of uncertainty about them, which 
never left him quite easy until he had veri- 
fied them. The loss to him in time and labor, 
he remarked, was something which, reckoned 
through a long series of years, was simply 
colossal. Have not many of us had exactly 
this experience? Now these permanent de- 
fects are bred in childhood. The tongue, the 
eye and the ear, instead of all being promptly 
set to work together by the constant correc- 
tion, through good usage and the elimination 
of errors, get out of the habit of working 
together and often the eye deceives the ear 
and not infrequently the tongue deceives the 
other two. What linguistic development does 
in early youth, is to bring about this coordi- 
nation and working together; they make a 
wonderful combination for thought and for 
the acquisition of knowledge. Our schools, 
grammar and high, are full of teachers who 
themselves exhibit these defects before their 
pupils and perpetuate errors of which they 
themselves were the victims in early life. Not 
long ago a learned man lecturing to a class in 
one of our Massachusetts colleges presented 
to his class the pitiful and ludicrous spectacle, 
while writing a sentence on the blackboard, of 
turning around and asking in a perplexed 



40 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

way, whether the word over which he was hes- 
itating was spelled with one "1" or two! In 
other words, he was exhibiting the phenomena 
of the elementary class room in his own per- 
son, as the child. Such exhibitions create a 
contempt for erudition which no amount of 
learning can dissipate. 

Verbal analysis is another thing which may 
be begun in the linguistic training of children 
at a very early period. Many of my readers, 
probably most of them, are familiar with 
Kingsley's "Water Babies." Very likely 
many who read that fascinating and charming 
child's book to their children, when they come 
to the chapter which deals with the professor's 
ailment, with Bumpsterhausen's blue follicles 
and the doctors' diagnosis of his case, skip 
over those long words, medical, surgical and 
otherwise, which make that chapter such a 
linguistic delight. But I found that the read- 
ing of those chapters carefully and with strict 
and precise enunciation, bred in my own chil- 
dren a great delight and amusement in the 
effort to repeat them. And I attribute to 
that book and that particular chapter a great 
deal of influence in my own household in the 
development of a resource of vocabulary 
which has been almost priceless in their educa- 
tion. For, be it remembered, every four- or 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 41 

five-syllabled word generally has a history. 
That history is itself a "story" for children par 
excellence if properly told and interestingly 
set forth. And, be it also remembered, that 
polysyllabic words are usually composed of 
simple words and may be taken apart, just ex- 
actly as a child takes off the arms and legs of 
a doll and digs out the stuffing to see what it 
is made of. Why should a child that can say 
"cat," "a" and "log" not say "catalogue"? 1 
To be sure, in this case, the syllables have no 
relation to the word in their meaning as simple 
ideas. But you have a three-syllabled word 
and I can see no reason in the world why a 
three-syllabled word with simple components 
should not be taught to a child. And as 
"stories" for children, the history of many 
long words is as fascinating as anything possi- 
bly can be. And all the while you are train- 
ing the ear for linguistic changes, you are 
taking language apart and showing how it is 
put together. You are really teaching verbal 

i Since writing the above the statement of Professor Guy M. 
Whipple, Assistant Professor of Science and Art of Education 
at Cornell University, has been brought to my notice, that 
after careful study he found out that his three-year-old boy 
had a vocabulary of 1,771 words, "catalogue" being one of 
them. This child also had such polysyllables at his command 
as thermometer, cunningest, chiffonier, "typewritering," cater- 
pillar, Cashmere, Bouquet, and many others. He had received 
no formal instruction. 



42 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

analysis, which is itself a very scientific process 
and one of the best for the development of 
the mind and the cultivation of ready and 
clear speech. Anybody can do this who has 
access to a dictionary. And many parents 
will add to their own store of information by 
doing this and will gain pleasure for them- 
selves and their children which will make a 
bond of union on the mental side, which is 
quite as interesting and quite as desirable for 
the uses of life as the physical bond. 

This is really nothing more than what is 
habitually done in other things. We often 
tear a flower apart and show its structure to 
children that they may see how it grows and 
where its life resides. We often take insects 
and have children watch them to see how they 
work and how they are able to perform what 
they do. Why not take words apart in the 
same way? Why not make language inter- 
esting in exactly the same way? I can hear 
some man say to me at once, "But I am not a 
philologist." Nobody asks you to be a philol- 
ogist. It is only needful to take a dictionary 
and utilize what you have and break it up into 
digestible fragments for the child. The sim- 
ple fact is, that in the things of the mind, we 
never think of doing these things. Let a 
child's dress become unbuttoned or a ruffle be- 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 43 

come frayed or a shoe lace untied and some- 
body notices it and there is immediate instruc- 
tion or correction in the matter. But when 
the mental process gets unlaced or the thought 
gets frayed into confusion, nearly all parents 
are too tired or too indolent to straighten out 
the matter, with the results which I have al- 
ready noted. I have heard many children ask 
their parents what certain long words meant 
because they struck the ear musically or cu- 
riously. But I have rarely seen the parent 
that would stop instantly and tell all that could 
be told, and that the parents in question them- 
selves could tell, about that word, thus utiliz- 
ing the interest which was there ready to be 
stimulated and enriched by further knowl- 
edge. But I have often seen a mother break 
into a sentence and give a child's hair ribbons 
the proper twist so that they might look right! 
I have seen more than one conversation broken 
into, by parents calling attention to some 
verbal absurdity which their child was perpe- 
trating, for the purpose of creating amuse- 
ment for the adults present! Expensive 
amusement, I think it is. And I have often 
thought of it when I have seen young people 
vainly trying to overcome the bad habits thus 
given a permanent place in their mental outfit. 
Now, as it happens, the English tongue is 



44 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

allied to many other languages. And there is 
hardly a city in America where the opportuni- 
ties for observation in the comparison of lan- 
guages is not afforded on street cars and in 
public places. Children if they are trained to 
it and directed in it, make most admirable use 
of their opportunities in this respect to their 
vast enjoyment. The resemblances between 
English and German, for example, are numer- 
ous. In any city where there is a considerable 
German population, there creeps into casual 
intercourse a great mass of words which in 
their superficial resemblance to English words 
make opportunities for word "stories" and 
open the way for the imparting of a great deal 
of collateral information, in the way of fer- 
tilization, of which I shall speak in a later 
chapter. Nor is this theory absolutely new. 
The late Professor Austin Phelps of Andover 
Seminary, facile princeps in the use of Eng- 
lish, in his lectures on "English Style in Pub- 
lic Discourse" advises young preachers to 
cultivate the use and knowledge of unfamiliar 
words. His argument is that a new word ar- 
rests attention in the congregation. All the 
people who are listening especially, if the 
word is in itself an interesting word, note it 
and probably some of them will look it up. 
Twenty years' experience in the pulpit has 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 45 

proved to me that as a fertilizer of thought in 
my congregation, nothing has been so effective 
as to state things in what might be called un- 
usual words. It arrested attention. It pro- 
voked thought. It started mental operations. 
By and by, it made people conscious that they 
were not only being religiously exhorted but 
mentally enlarged. I had for many years a 
dozen teachers who came to my congregation 
long distances on Sunday mornings from 
other communities because they found this 
process so useful to them. There is absolutely 
no reason why with the necessary changes 
incidental to childhood, the same rule cannot 
be followed in any household. And when it 
is followed, there grows in the child mind a 
resource for mental development, which is the 
most powerful instrument of knowledge. The 
earlier this process begins, the sooner the 
treasure-house of knowledge is opened to chil- 
dren. 

And when once that treasure-house is opened 
by means of a large, clearly apprehended 
and widely differentiated vocabulary, there 
is no limit to the possibilities. I once had 
a young Irish lad in my congregation whose 
natural wit and verbal fluency attracted me, 
especially as it was exercised so exclusively 
along lines which were worse than useless. 



46 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

I got him interested in me and got him to 
reading certain books and talking with me 
about them. His verbal sense was quickly- 
aroused and after half-a-dozen years he got 
so in the habit of using my own vocabulary 
that a missionary classmate of mine who came 
to Boston from a foreign land, after years of 
absence, and did not know exactly where the 
church of which I was then pastor was located, 
dropped into our young people's meeting be- 
fore the evening service intending at its close 
to make inquiries, but said afterward that he 
did not need to make the inquiry because pres- 
ently in the remarks of a young boy he recog- 
nized some peculiarities of my own vocabulary. 
It was the young Irishman. To-day that 
youth is performing the same service for a 
Sunday school of over five hundred pupils. 
He is a marked man in the form and utterance 
of his public speech. I have seen this process 
repeated over and over again. 

All thinking is in terms of language and 
until there is a sound linguistic basis you can 
have no real thinking. It is, therefore, the 
paramount problem of education to create first 
and foremost in the minds of young children 
as rich and full and varied a knowledge of 
words as possible. It is not necessary that 
they shall fully "understand" all that these 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 47 

words mean or all that can be made of them. 
It is enough that what they do know is accu- 
rate and is not allied to something that is false 
and that requires to be unlearned. The sup- 
position that this initial contact with the 
mother tongue must be always in the simplest 
and most elementary forms is, in my judg- 
ment and according to my experience, wrong. 
Composite sounds and the most varied syl- 
labic construction can be taught with very 
little effort, and if allied to the most simple 
musical knowledge and made rhythmic, there 
is almost no limit to what can be done. I have 
taught a child to repeat an entire Hebrew 
psalm, with absolutely not a single error in 
pronunciation, without the child "understand- 
ing" anything about it other than it was the 
Hebrew way of saying what the child knew 
in English and had learned as a part of its 
Bible study. I have taught a child to repeat 
fifty lines of Virgil in exactly the same way. 
Of course somebody will say, "What was the 
use?" The use was, apart from the fact that 
it created traditions and mind stuff, that it 
taught careful vocalization and trained the ear 
to note the varied succession of sounds and es- 
tablished the ability to grapple with any word, 
however long or however unfamiliar. Mod- 
ern languages, German and French, should be 



48 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

taught in this way first of all. What is this 
but the process reduced to a programme which 
we employ casually and in a slovenly manner 
when we simply let children learn their mother 
tongue by hearing it talked? This is simply 
organizing the materials out of which the 
linguistic consciousness shall be made. It is 
the erection of barriers against misuse and de- 
fective usage. It is the building of the solid 
substructure of knowledge by the formation 
of standards which once made have a deter- 
minative influence in the whole subsequent 
contact with the things for which language is 
employed. It means that certain things are 
automatically excluded and made impossible in 
the educational development of the child mind. 
It means that all along the pathway of its 
growth it will find materials planted in the 
early years, which will be lights for the illumi- 
nation of dark places and guides for the path- 
way out of obscurity and mental confusion. 
Many things not "understood" by a child are 
nevertheless, I have found out, stored away in 
the mind and at the appropriate moment re- 
appear, to give the pleasure and delight of the 
renewal of an old acquaintance. The child 
that has built up for it a sound and consider- 
able and varied vocabulary before it is six 
years of age, will have, other things being 



THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 49 

equal, three years the start of any child not 
so trained. It will have access to more books, 
more forms of knowledge, will have intellect- 
ual interests and intellectual enjoyments which 
the average child of nine not only does not 
know but in many cases probably never will 
know. I count this linguistic training as the 
most important factor in the whole scheme of 
intensive development for children. I cannot 
see that the child loses one thing that it would 
otherwise have. I cannot see that any child 
pleasure, any child enjoyment, any rational 
and sound and delightful characteristic of true 
and happy childhood need in the slightest be 
interfered with. But on the contrary I have 
seen childhood develop and its companionship 
and fellowship with parents, with nature, with 
the world, with the phenomena of life, vastly 
increased, and happy childhood made happier 
because there were left no cruel malforma- 
tions to cause the heart-breaking distresses of 
later school years. I have seen such intensive 
development with no loss of health and with 
decided gain to every other interest. The tool 
of that development was a large and compre- 
hensive acquaintance with and use of the 
mother tongue. 



The infant as soon as born was not consigned to 
the dwelling of a hireling nurse, but was reared and 
cherished in the bosom of its mother, whose highest 
praise it was to take care of her household affairs and 
attend to her children. ... In her presence not 
one indecent word was uttered; nothing was done 
against propriety and good manners. The hours of 
study and serious employment were settled by her 
direction, and not only so but even the diversions of 
the children were conducted with modest reserve and 
sanctity of manners. . . . The consequence of 
this regular discipline was, that the young mind, 
whole and sound, and unwarped by irregular pas- 
sions, received the elements of the liberal arts with 
hearty avidity. 

— Tacitus on the Training of Roman Children. 



Ill 

MIND FERTILIZATION 

One of the strangest things about civiliza- 
tion in all ages, and not less of our own than 
of those preceding it, is the fact that in almost 
all things with which men have had to do ex- 
cept the preparation of children for life, they 
have recognized the necessity for adequate 
preparation and proper fertilization. Some 
years ago, having recently moved into the 
country, I noted how a certain neighbor of 
mine, who had been very successful in raising 
apples, prepared the soil for some young trees 
he was setting out. He did not simply dig a 
hole and stick in the trees. He carefully 
studied the nature of the soil, the requirements 
of the particular trees he was planting, pro- 
vided for their growth in their earlier years, 
and in every manner possible saw to it that his 
trees should come to the bearing period strong, 
healthful and thoroughly fitted to make the 
greatest possible yield. He and his farm are 
in distinct contrast to all those about him. 
They rarely yield any profit, his always yields 
a profit. Their children, as soon as they are 

51 



52 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

able to work, leave school and join their care- 
less, untrained parents in making a bare living 
from the land. His children have, as they 
have come along, gone to fitting school and 
college. He ships apples to Europe, lives 
well, is a reading man and has a lovely home 
and otherwise makes his New Hampshire 
place furnish not only living but a life. Re- 
duced to lowest terms, it comes of the fact that 
he fertilizes the soil for the trees which furnish 
the income out of which all his other enjoy- 
ments and advantages arise. 

It is one of the anomalies of our own time 
that this perfectly simple and natural process 
is so little applied to children. Take almost 
any community in this land and the curious 
thing about it is that, not excepting college or 
educated communities and observing what 
parents permit their children to imbibe as the 
subsoil out of which their later lives are to 
emerge, you will be astounded to notice that 
all the mental weeds have the first and best 
chance. You will be surprised to find that 
there is an almost complete absence of plan in 
the matter of stocking the child mind with 
useful, fertile notions and a neglect of the 
mental soil which, in any other operation, 
would be pronounced scandalous in the ex- 
treme. No factory would for an instant con- 



MIND FERTILIZATION 53 

sent to have its raw material treated with both 
the positive injury and the disgraceful neg- 
lect to which children's minds are subjected in 
the most attractive and acquisitive period. No 
mechanic would think of treating his tools as 
people suff er their children's main asset for a 
happy and useful life to be handled. No 
skilled workman would dream of allowing an 
immature and ignorant person to handle his 
delicate instruments in the manner in which 
parents allow foolish and unlearned and even 
vicious persons to experiment with the mental 
life and habits of their own offspring. The 
result of all this is plain in the thousands of 
absolutely incapable people all around us, 
who have no initiative of their own and have 
to a great degree lost even the power of intel- 
ligently grasping initiative which is provided 
for them by others. 

Trees, plants, must have a prepared soil 
for their proper growth and development, 
why not children? Here again, the physical 
base of life is beginning to get fair recogni- 
tion, but still in a blundering way. One of 
the ludicrous instances of this latter statement 
may be found in the playground movement, 
now nation-wide and steadily developing. I 
visited lately a recently opened and beauti- 
fully equipped playground. Its site was 



54 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

lovely and thoroughly attractive. The 
grounds were bountifully bestowed with appa- 
ratus which admitted of many varieties of ex- 
ercise and enjoyment. It had many things 
which the children of the most opulent might 
well wish to make their own. But as I 
watched the children about that ground the 
one thing that impressed me most, was the 
utter poverty of the children in the ability to 
use what they had thus abundantly placed 
before them. Half-a-dozen forms of play 
would probably cover all that they did. And 
the one most needful thing of all was wanting, 
— a skilled and thoroughly trained person to 
teach these children how to play. Contrasted 
with the skilled German play-instructors I 
have seen, with only a fragment of the appa- 
ratus to deal with, it seemed like a pathetic 
waste of material, and I could think of noth- 
ing other than a noveau riclie country vainly 
trying to imitate the older country that had 
less to do with but used it with vastly more in- 
telligence and effectiveness. But at least the 
playground recognized the need for a substan- 
tial physical base, and health was written in 
large letters on all that the eye could see, and 
the intention was everywhere evident. 

But who thinks of preparing the mind in 
the same ample fashion? How many persons 



MIND FERTILIZATION 55 

systematically think of giving to the growing 
mind the raw materials of knowledge, the 
elementary forms of science, and generally of 
habituating the minds of children to grasp 
important and useful facts and otherwise pre- 
pare for some adequate familiarity in mature 
life with the world in which they are to live 
and move and have their being? How many, 
even of educated parents, have a clearly 
thought-out plan for filling the minds of their 
children with the things without which success- 
ful access to mental fullness and enjoyment is 
well-nigh impossible? In other words who 
thinks of doing for the child mind what my 
friend, the farmer, does for every tree he 
plants ? 

One reason why so few people think along 
these lines, is the prevalence of the supersti- 
tion that the child mind cannot grasp impor- 
tant and fundamental things as readily as 
foolish and absurd things. Hence the "sim- 
plification" of all sorts of things for the child 
mind and the reduction to something worse 
than folly of the operations of the young 
intellect on the theory that whatever ideas 
are given to it, have to be made semi- 
idiotic before the young intellect can handle 
them. All the while, wherever the young 
mind is left to itself, it gravitates automatic- 



56 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

ally to something worth while and funda- 
mental, wherever choice is possible. Little 
girls take to dolls almost from the beginning. 
They play naturally with the profoundest 
problem of humanity, namely, the rearing and 
training of childhood. They introduce natu- 
rally and with exactitude principles, which, 
when science develops them and organizes 
them and proves them, are called by various 
profound scientific names. By and by the 
absurd processes called education interfere 
with these natural processes of the child deal- 
ing with fundamental things and then ensues 
that fearful period of adolescence, full of hor- 
rors and distresses which are no more neces- 
sary than smallpox or typhoid fever. Al- 
most all the so-called horrors of the adolescent 
period show conclusively that the natural proc- 
esses of childhood have become perverted by 
what we call "education," and the whole mis- 
erable muddle in which civilization finds itself 
on the sex question, is almost directly due to 
this artificial and obfuscating interference 
together with inability and ignorance in prop- 
erly fertilizing the child mind on the signifi- 
cance of knowledge, which it is not only 
perfectly capable of receiving but which hav- 
ing, it will automatically apply. 

Why food for the body and not for the 



MIND FERTILIZATION 57 

mind? Why strictly regulated and properly 
prepared food for the stomach and not for 
the mind? Why shall the baby be filled with 
carefully selected nutriment for its little body 
and then stuffed with all sorts of rubbish for 
its little mind? This is one of the funda- 
mental questions in the rearing of children and 
perhaps one of the most neglected of all. The 
simple fact is that the superstitions about 
things which are vital and important still be- 
fog the minds of people and prevent them 
from doing as well by their children as they 
would do by the plant in the window or the 
tree in the field. That the mind must have its 
food prepared will strike many persons as a 
positively new idea. That that food should 
itself be subject to constant, careful scrutiny 
and revision is absolutely beyond the view. 
But there is the mind, with all its powers 
awake, observing, taking in and making its 
own, everything that it possibly can come into 
contact with and either classifying and dis- 
tributing in an orderly way its fresh acquisi- 
tions or muddling them up, to their useless- 
ness as fertilization, and also destroying the 
very powers by which they are acquired. 

Now the object of this chapter is to con- 
vince and persuade that if you want a full 
mind and a well-nurtured one, you must fer- 



58 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

tilize it, so that when ideas present themselves, 
they will find a soil fitted to receive them. 
This means that you regulate not only what 
ideas are received, but when and in what form. 
That there shall be an intelligent and deliber- 
ate choice of ideas for the child mind and most 
of all that what goes into the mind shall have 
some relation to the higher views of life, and 
that mental weeds shall not possess the soil to 
such an extent that half of life has to be con- 
sumed in rooting out what has been by neglect 
and blunder permitted to occupy the soil. 

Among the very first things to consider in 
this relation is that what are called the higher 
things of life, the more profound, if you 
please, are as easily acquired in childhood as 
any others. I have already referred to the 
obfuscation of children's minds on the subject 
of sex. But the same thing is true about 
many other things. A child can be taught 
the fundamental principles of geometry, for 
example, at three as readily as it can be taught 
to build a block house. It can be taught to 
observe relations which are fundamental in 
mathematical calculation as easily at four as it 
can any of the nonsense which is usually sup- 
posed to be fit for children at that age. Even 
the fundamental principles of philology can 
be thus taught and I have seen children at 



MIND FERTILIZATION 59 

three, four and five analyze words and recog- 
nize stems and make proper and cogent infer- 
ences by reason of resemblances in form and 
use, which, if they appeared in a text-book or 
a doctor's thesis, would be called scientific 
knowledge. Of course, somebody had to 
teach it. Of course, somebody had to call the 
child's attention to these things. But there 
was no greater difficulty on the part of the 
child, that I could discover, in taking in that 
kind of knowledge than any other. In fact, 
the process became so interesting that the child 
soon attempted it on its own account with 
amusing and interesting results. I recall 
very well dealing with a very young child once 
on the subject of "species." This is a scien- 
tific word and involved considerable explana- 
tion, but it was worth all it cost both in time 
and effort when after a rain the little girl see- 
ing a robin pick up a worm propounded the 
question, "Papa, fishes eat worms and birds 
eat worms. Do they belong to the same spe- 
cies?" To rouse that mental operation was 
itself to start the sources of knowledge from 
their hiding places. The worms in question 
brought forth another interesting specimen of 
the automatic application of the child mind to 
questions of knowledge. The small boy aged 
four being told about worms being "articu- 



60 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

lates" and the possibility of the growth of 
their various segments, was found on the 
same occasion that the "species" episode oc- 
curred, cutting up worms into parts, with a 
view to multiplying the species, having also 
been told that they kept the soil loose so that 
the plants could spread their roots more 
readily in the loosened soil. There you had 
one of the great scientific generalizations, one 
of the great geological facts of the distribu- 
tion of the earth's surface, properly and 
firmly habited in the child's mind in a fashion 
which need never be disturbed. 

In a similar way the silver at the table, the 
glass, the china, the food and its sources, all 
become the media for the conveying of exact 
and interesting knowledge. Now the im- 
portant thing about all these things was not 
merely that real and useful information was 
placed in the mind, but that the mind itself 
was being fertilized for the subsequent recep- 
tion of other information and provided with 
the machinery for its proper classification and 
retention. In this way, geography and arith- 
metic and grammar and various sciences were 
taught, not as such, but as fertilizing material 
which by their occupancy of the mind, ex- 
cluded the vile stuff which is usually doled 
out to the infant intellect, and what is more, 



MIND FERTILIZATION 61 

and perhaps best of all, was that these particu- 
lar children were made immune from the mis- 
use of their minds later on in life. There 
was nothing- supernatural about it. It was 
simply doing what my friend, the farmer, did 
for his trees. The mental soil was fertilized 
by things inherently useful, interesting and 
suggestive, and a rudimentary organization 
was set up to properly husband what came 
into the mind for future use. 

The fertilization here described was of 
course of the nature of the surroundings of 
the children in question. A legal friend of 
mine who was accustomed to take home with 
him cases to prepare for trial was greatly as- 
tounded after some months to hear his young 
son who often sat in the next room while he 
was dictating to his stenographer, not merely 
use but accurately apply many legal terms in 
his play. He heard his small boy repeat the 
most complicated legal sentences, those rem- 
nants of barbarism, the rage and despair of all 
lovers of truth and justice and the proper use 
of language. He heard this child utter with 
ease and skill whole paragraphs of pleadings 
and was both shocked and humiliated to find 
that his child, left to himself, grappled with 
the severities of the language under their most 
grotesque and damnable forms (no other 



62 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

word fits the legal nomenclature) while he 
habitually talked twaddle and foolishness with 
his child. A physician classmate of mine has 
related something- of the same sort about one 
of his children who learned to connect certain 
ailments with certain symptoms and diseases 
and made him often, when he wrote a pre- 
scription, remembering the comments of his 
child upon the same diseases, feel absolutely 
silly. But why need he have been surprised? 
The child mind will take what is offered. 
Offer it folderol and idiotic stuff in the shape 
of brutalized English and misinformation of 
all kinds and that will be its mental subsoil. 
Offer it knowledge, clear, accurate and classi- 
fied, and you will get an orderly mind and one 
that governs and regulates its own processes 
presently. Nor will this little mind be a 
genius ! It will simply be as well fed in mind 
as it is in body. It will simply have as much 
attention given to what it thinks as to what it 
eats. In other words, parents will be think- 
ing almost as much of the brains of their chil- 
dren as they now think of their bowels. Is it 
so revolutionary a principle as some people 
seem to imagine that you get out of a child's 
mind what you put into it, no more, no less? 
Does it involve some hocus-pocus or other 
magic to believe that if you give a child's mind 



MIND FERTILIZATION 63 

worthy things to think about, that it will, by 
and by, handle all things worthily? 

The objection most commonly urged against 
this process of enriching the minds of children 
by real knowledge and worth-while material, 
is that it interferes with the child's healthful 
growth and development which seems one of 
the most foolish ideas that ever obsessed the 
human brain. On this theory we should go 
back to the oldest of superstitions and fill the 
minds of children with all kinds of outlandish 
stuff and prevent any modern ideas from ob- 
taining an entrance and, in sooth, that seems 
to be what many people do. Unfortunately, 
too, the domain in which they operate most ap- 
pears to be that of religion, where ideas of God 
and the world and sin and evil and the rest are 
inculcated — ideas which can hardly emerge in 
anything but gross errors of all kinds which 
finally express themselves in the grotesque 
ideas of morals and behavior which are so com- 
mon. Possibly if it were carefully worked 
out, it could readily be shown that the absurd 
divorce of religion and morality, for example, 
one of the commonest phenomena of our day, 
has its rise in this practice. Then again, the 
play upon the fears and ignorance of children, 
the use of that ignorance and those fears for 
the convenience of the parent or teacher and as 



64 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

a means of avoiding the labor of giving the 
correct or needed instruction, also has its large 
influence. In any case, if to inculcate modern 
ideas is destructive of health, the deliverance of 
the world from the miserable bondage in which 
it now welters, will be long deferred. 

But the answer to this objection is simply 
that it is not true. Not a single reason can be 
adduced to show that giving a child informa- 
tion about geometry is one whit more calcu- 
lated to break down health than to give it 
Mother Goose rhymes. Nor can it be shown 
that to give it accurate knowledge about botany 
is one degree worse for its physical well-being 
than to chatter simply about the "pretty flow- 
ers." Some kind of information the child is 
bound to gather. Some kind of ideas is sure 
to germinate and occupy the soil. If non- 
sense, then you have a nonsense foundation 
which will assuredly have to be forked over and 
dug out as a garden has to be forked to get 
out the weeds if you are to have productiveness 
afterward. 

Side by side with this habit of approach is 
the equally silly notion that you are denuding 
childhood of its beauty and innocence. Do 
weeds make a garden beautiful? Is the proc- 
ess of pulling up the ugly things which de- 
form and befuddle the mind one of beauty and 



MIND FERTILIZATION 65 

loveliness or is it one of pain and wretchedness ? 
Clearly the latter. The soil of the child mind 
keeps rare and beautiful when it is filled with 
rare and beautiful things and such things are 
choice in their demands for soil and culture. 
The persistent care in the selection of materials 
and the wise and intelligent arrangement of 
this material to suit times and seasons will 
make a certain parallelism between the growth 
of the mind of the child and the periods of the 
year and the periods of its own development, 
which is itself one of the beautiful facts of hu- 
man growth. When the fertilizing process 
has been carried on for a few years, one sees 
just what one sees in a carefully planted 
orchard or a carefully arranged garden, each 
thing in its place, each healthfully developing, 
each bearing in its season after its own kind 
and each supplementing the other in beautiful 
cooperation and correlation. I am at this mo- 
ment thinking of the great natural processes 
which were taught to little children, not far 
from the place where this is written, by watch- 
ing the operations of ants, bees, wasps and 
birds. Of the biological principles which were 
here shown and steadily developed so that when 
the same children who "played" at knowledge 
with these, found themselves face to face with 
the "science" of the same things in college, 



66 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

they met old friends with delight and made 
knowledge seven times more of a friend than it 
was, if possible, before. If anything was done 
in the matter of the beauty and innocence of 
childhood, it was extended and given a longer 
lease of life and a continuity into the severer 
questions of maturity, which made the natural 
difficulty of these problems somewhat less be- 
cause they seemed inwoven with the develop- 
ment of lif e itself, as indeed they are. The in- 
comparable folly of postponing the period of 
knowledge till it has to be approached with 
perverted tastes and muddled ideas is equaled 
only by the insanity that this process conserves 
the beauty of childhood. 

I have just referred to a certain parallelism 
between the growth of knowledge and times 
and seasons. The idea seems a trifle romantic 
of course. But just reflect for a moment how 
different the phenomena of winter are from 
those of spring and what a wide variation there 
is of principles to be taught in the two seasons. 
Could a finer arrangement for contrasts and 
comparison of ideas and knowledge for little 
children possibly be devised? It almost seems 
as though the things were arranged for the 
purpose of training the juvenile mind to ob- 
servation and comparison and for the noting 
of very diverse and interesting processes. 



MIND FERTILIZATION 67 

Yet, except in the most superficial way and 
that chiefly calculated to breed dilettantism, 
little or no use is made by most people of these 
seasons to teach the young mind the great laws 
of nature and the similar laws of the human 
mind. But they are there to be taught and 
taught accurately and by a method thoroughly 
in accord with known science. In fact, it was 
by these very processes that primitive man be- 
gan his march toward knowledge and light. 
Are we not to continue that march or are our 
children perpetually to go through the savage 
process of being torn up by the roots, harrowed 
over by ignorant and brutalized schoolmasters 
themselves harrowed over by equally obtuse 
college professors, until they come forth 
dubbed bachelors of arts, unable to think 
clearly, discuss any subject with fullness or in- 
telligence and incapable of meeting the sim- 
plest ethical problems with firmness or justice? 
If this seems a severe indictment, let people 
simply look about them and they will see on 
every hand the pitiful results of a process 
which ultimately resolves itself into this: that 
there were planted in the virgin soil of child- 
hood, weeds instead of sound, useful, produc- 
tive things and not only so, but the entire soil 
itself was left to become sterile and unproduc- 
tive of anything worth while. 



68 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

Clearly this is a parental question. It can- 
not be left until the period called "school age" 
as though this age came automatically accord- 
ing to some heavenly arranged arithmetical 
succession. By the time what is called school 
age arrives, the damage has usually been done. 
The habits, while not utterly deranged, have 
been deformed by ill usage and the very mind 
stuff itself corrupted by the infusion of all 
kinds of superstition, puerility and falsehood, 
so that only the most persistent effort on the 
part of everybody concerned — parent, teacher 
and the whole organization of church and 
state and home — can scarcely bring order out 
of the chaos which the early sterilization of the 
mind has produced. It is a never-ending mira- 
cle to me that the mass of children turn out as 
well as they do, though perhaps this is because 
they lack the training and mental organization 
and power of initiative to do very much that 
is effectively bad. Dr. Conan Doyle remarks 
that it is a common sight to see the best head in 
a court room on the shoulders of the criminal 
in the dock, which is simply saying that that 
head very likely has been least under the leash 
of the processes we have been describing and 
has had a natural though lawless development 
and at least has not lost its power of self -pro- 
pulsion and has not slavishly laid itself under 



MIND FERTILIZATION 6Q 

the taskmaster's lash of consistent dullness and 
stupidity. In this same connection perhaps 
the natural alliance between genius and irregu- 
larities of one kind and another, which some 
psychologists allege, is due to just the fact 
which I have been discussing, that the genius 
has kept his power of observation and initia- 
tive unimpaired and perhaps in early youth es- 
caped the brutalizing and leveling process 
which we call education, and so brought forth 
something which was at least his own and not 
the stupid, crass product passed on from gen- 
eration to generation as knowledge. But, we 
may ask, must genius always be yoked with ir- 
regularity? Can we not have originality, ini- 
tiative, freedom and unimpaired power and yet 
have orderly persons, conscious of social obliga- 
tion and amenable to the natural intercourse of 
human beings, living with and for each other? 
Why must "bright" people always be held to 
be somewhat "eccentric" or otherwise "pecul- 
iar" or something else which makes them un- 
livable? There is no more need for this thing 
than there is that "bright" people should all 
have red hair or blue eyes. The more simple 
explanation is that most people are jammed 
into somebody's mold of misinformation or no 
information, fed on falsehoods, nurtured on 
inanities or stupidities or worse, and then ex- 



70 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

pected to develop into useful men and women. 
The expectation that somehow or other we shall 
be able to gather figs from thistles continues to 
be the outstanding characteristic of the human 
mind. Parents seem to hold this superstition 
most rigidly, school-teachers are next and col- 
lege professors are third in the ascending scale 
of inability to see that the place where things 
begin, is at the beginning. 

But just gaze for a moment on the reverse 
of the picture I have presented. Here is born 
a child into a home where from the moment of 
its appearance, yes, long before its appearance, 
there is preparation made for the little 
stranger's mind as well as his body. Along 
with the little bassinet which contains the cov- 
ering for his body, there is a well defined pro- 
gramme for his mind. There is an arrange- 
ment of what his eyes shall look upon, what his 
ears shall hear and the form and methods by 
which the earliest ideas shall find their way into 
Ms mind. He shall be taught the truth. 
That guarantees his freedom! He shall be 
given useful and interesting knowledge of real 
life. That insures reality for him in the outer 
world. He shall be trained to see with his 
eyes and hear with his ears and he shall be 
shown how to coordinate what enters through 
these two gates to his mind. That will give 



MIND FERTILIZATION 71 

him tools for his mind and thoughts for his 
tongue. He shall speak, when he speaks at all, 
accurately and his linguistic machinery shall 
from the very first help him, not hinder him. 
He shall learn to note sounds and distinguish 
sweet sounds from those that are harsh. He 
shall try his mind as he tries his little arms and 
legs and shall gain mental strength coordi- 
nately with his physical growth so that while 
he walks on his legs, he shall not creep in his 
mind. He shall have his mind food as care- 
fully chosen as his bodily food and he shall be 
kept mentally true and clean as he is cleansed 
daily and bathed bodily. Is the result hard 
to imagine? Not at all. This child will be 
original, will be fearless, will have the power 
and the interest of experimentation, will show 
zest for all kinds of knowledge, and will find 
the gathering of information as great a joy as 
he can possibly know. Presently somebody 
will call him a "prodigy," absolutely ignorant 
of the simple and entirely natural process by 
which the all-round development of the child 
has been secured. And possibly another per- 
son will want his progress "retarded" lest he 
become "prematurely old" and "lose his youth" 
and Heaven knows what other folly will be 
foisted upon him simply because his mind was 
properly cared for as my old farmer friend 



72 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

prepared the soil for his tree. But all the time 
the natural law of fertilization and enrichment 
for productiveness has been followed without 
special interposition of the Deity or miraculous 
assistance of any kind. The tree was planted 
in good ground and it brought forth abun- 
dantly. That was all ! 



One of the best and ablest men of the city was, 
moreover, appointed inspector of the youth and he 
gave command of each company to the most spirited 
and discreetest of those, called Irens. . . . The 
Iren reposing himself after supper used to order 
some of the boys to sing a song; to another he put 
some question which required a judicious answer, for 
example: "Who was the best man in the city?" or 
"What he thought of such an action?" This accus- 
tomed them from their childhood to judge of the vir- 
tues, to enter into the affairs of their countrymen. 
For if one of them was asked, "Who is a good citizen 
or who is an infamous one?" and hesitated in his an- 
swer he was considered as a boy of slow parts and of a 
soul that would not aspire to honor. The answer 
was likewise to have a reason assigned for it and 
proof conceived in few words. 

— Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus. 



IV 
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 

If it is true, as Isaac Disraeli says, that "the 
wisdom of the wise and the experience of the 
ages may be preserved by quotation," it is even 
more true that the knowledge of the past and 
the observation of the present may be conveyed 
through the art of interrogation. Anyone 
who recalls his school experience will readily 
recognize the force of this statement. In fact, 
there is no surer method of determining real 
progress in any direction than the effective 
use of questions and answers. The Socratic 
method, which was also the method of all early 
assemblies and teachers, namely, of telling 
things by being asked about them or creating 
the materials of thought by arousing questions 
in the student's mind and then causing the in- 
quirer to answer his own questions, remains 
still the best method of producing sound 
mental action and steady mental force. 

Questions have several characteristics which 
are not commonly appreciated as having very 
important influence in the child mind. A 

75 



76 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

question rightly put is an exchange of ideas 
between two living personalities who are not 
merely searching for knowledge but are com- 
paring ideas. This is what constitutes the chief 
difference between a question in a book and an 
oral question. No inquiries printed on a page 
of a book will ever elicit what the same ques- 
tions will secure when verbally addressed from 
one mind to another. Manner, intonation, ac- 
cent, the glance of the eye and a great many 
other things accompany the oral question, 
which are absent from the printed page. Then 
again, the flexibility of language often admits 
two or even more interpretations of exactly the 
same words. That admits at once doubt, 
which is itself the greatest thought-disperser I 
know anything about. Only create hesitation 
about the meaning of a printed question and 
you have taken a most substantial step toward 
making it impossible for a child to organize his 
thought on that particular subject. This is 
the reason why teachers are so often mystified 
by the differences between the apparent attain- 
ments of a child in class and his utter failure to 
make the same impression when confronted by 
an examination paper. And until examina- 
tion papers are written in a form which does 
not admit of ambiguity, and few papers can be 
written which will not admit of a variety of 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 77 

interpretations, this difference will always ap- 
pear. 

This is not confined to children and the 
student body alone. It has taken the Supreme 
Court of the United States twenty years to 
find out just what the law relating to huge in- 
dustrial combinations means. And apparently 
the final decision has created as much uneasi- 
ness as to its finality as the original law did. 
For years the best lawyers in the land struggled 
to find out just what the exact legal relation of 
their great enterprises to the statute was. 
And yet it was drawn by men of vast experi- 
ence in law-making, men who had been ad- 
visers to great interests for many years and 
who, if anybody knew, might have been as- 
sumed capable of saying what they meant. 
Yet when the Supreme Court came to review 
that act, at least one distinguished member of 
the court which rendered the decision stated 
that the court had read into the law something 
which was not there at all! Why should a 
child be expected automatically to guess just 
what the teacher had in mind in writing any 
question unless it is so plain as to answer it- 
self? The simple truth is, that anyone who 
knows anything about the reading and mark- 
ing of examination papers knows that different 
markers will give totally different valuations 



78 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

to exactly the same reply. It is the personal 
equation which has been taken out of the ques- 
tion and the question is, in fact, not a question 
properly at all when considered from the true 
standpoint of a test of knowledge. It is pos- 
sible in certain forms of mathematics to give 
exact questions and for this reason mathemat- 
ics have the least possible educational value of 
all studies. But the moment you get into a 
region where active thought is employed, the 
personal equation is so important that, as 
stated, unless the question practically answers 
itself there is room for an almost endless va- 
riety of answers. Turn a moment to another 
profession. All successful medical practice 
turns upon successful diagnosis. But what 
are the facts when you have a serious case of 
sickness? Not infrequently the very best 
minds will give totally different interpreta- 
tions of exactly the same data. The elements 
of experience, personality, habits of mind, 
moral steadiness and a great many other things 
enter into the diagnosis together with the med- 
ical imagination, all of which suggest different 
courses of procedure. This is within the com- 
mon knowledge of all people. Why should a 
child be expected from a printed question to 
find the exact reply which was in the teacher's 
mind in framing the question? And if, in the 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 79 

stating of the question, there was the addi- 
tional desire, and it is not infrequently present, 
to confuse the student or at least to trick him 
into saying what the question does not call for, 
by deliberate ambiguity, who is responsible for 
the absurd and stupid answers with which all 
examination papers abound? There is hardly 
a greater indictment possible of much educa- 
tional procedure than the methods which edu- 
cators employ to test their students. 

Now this whole matter goes back much far- 
ther than most people suppose. The art of 
questioning is an art. That must be recognized 
first of all. And as an art it must be culti- 
vated and because it is an art subject to culti- 
vation there is nothing particularly mysterious 
or baffling about it. In a similar way the art 
of replying is also an art and may be cultivated, 
and there is nothing mysterious about that. 
And where the relations of the questioner and 
the questioned are sound relations, art will 
develop naturally and will prove one of the 
most fertile instruments of mental develop- 
ment. The true manner of discovering 
whether certain knowledge has been mastered 
and is a permanent part of the mental furni- 
ture or not turns very largely upon this item 
of questions and answers. To frame a ques- 
tion properly constitutes the fine art of teach- 



80 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

ing. And to begin the framing of questions 
properly with little children is to prepare them 
for giant strides in intellectual advancement. 
Who ever thinks of putting questions to little 
children with exactness and with the purpose 
of causing exact mental effort on the part of 
the child? 

To give one more illustration in this matter, 
I take from the five text-books on Virgil's 
"iEneid" before me the following: Here is a 
line containing a noun in the ablative case. 
Two of the five text-books in the notes call it 
a dative, the forms being alike. The other 
three call it an ablative, but all three differ 
among themselves as to what kind of an abla- 
tive it is ! But someone will say that is a for- 
eign language. True enough. But I have 
also before me at this moment ten English 
papers in which a high-school teacher had 
given what I have no doubt she supposed was 
an accurate statement of what she wished her 
students to do. But four of the students did 
one thing, three did another and three did 
something still different and none of them did 
what the teacher declares she called for ! And 
they constituted more than half of the class. 
Now obviously somebody was at fault. The 
case is made even more interesting by the fact 
that five out of the ten are the best students in 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 81 

the class judged by their previous markings. 
Now it would be unfair in this particular case 
to hold that she is an exception among the great 
mass of teachers of high-school English. My 
own opinion is that she is an exceptionally 
capable one. But the fact still remains that 
her ambiguity in stating a question which, as 
I think, admitted of clear statement, threw 
half her class, and the better half at that, into 
absolute confusion. I have seen history papers 
in which the confusion was even worse con- 
founded. When, therefore, one sees a news- 
paper article announcing the fearful and won- 
derful information which examination papers 
reveal, it will be well to remember that per- 
haps the English in which these questions were 
put, was in some instances, at least, almost as 
fearful and wonderful as the replies. And 
the absolute elimination of the personal rela- 
tion, through which knowledge comes most 
readily, most accurately and with greatest 
logical coherence, tends to make the matter 
more comprehensible. I know any number of 
persons whose letters so absolutely misrepre- 
sent them that they would not possibly be rec- 
ognized by them. In fact I lately made an 
experiment along this line. 

I called together one evening five young per- 
sons from whom I had previously received let- 



82 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

ters on the same subject. I asked two very 
gifted persons, teachers of effectiveness and 
conversationalists of talent and skill, to meet 
them and on the basis of an evening's inter- 
course with these young people write the names 
of the authors upon their own letters, that is, 
identify the author as personally known in her 
written work. The result was absolutely ludi- 
crous. In only one case was there any sem- 
blance of agreement and this was afterward 
confessed as being induced by something that 
had nothing to do with the matter of the letters. 
As a matter of fact there was nothing in the 
letters that in the slightest degree made it pos- 
sible to link the written document with the 
living person. Afterward I gave some in- 
struction to one of these persons, with the re- 
sult that there began to be some coherence be- 
tween the person and the document she wrote. 
The letters were full of blunders of all kinds. 
The spoken speech was almost faultless in so 
far as a general conversation reveals such 
faults. The grammatical absurdities which 
these young people wrote would have made 
them impossible for an evening's conversation. 
Yet they were interesting people and capable 
people. The simple fact was, that, asked orally 
about the same things concerning which they 
wrote brokenly, stupidly and blunderingly, 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 83 

they were reflective, measurably exact and in- 
teresting. And between the two there was a 
great gulf fixed. 

From all this I wish simply to establish the 
extreme importance of the personal equation 
in the matter of giving and extracting knowl- 
edge. My point is that this process should be- 
gin so early that the necessary allowances in 
a child's mind will be made and such judgment 
developed and exercised that the almost neces- 
sary ambiguity, inherent in a language like the 
English language, will be met by the ability to 
think around the subject and make some just 
and correct inferences as to what the question 
probably means. This involves the cultivation 
in the home of the art of questioning and of an- 
swering questions and of interlinking factual 
knowledge with inferential judgments so as to 
make available whatever knowledge there is in 
the child mind. 

Wise questioning almost always turns upon 
the nature of the relation of the vocabulary of 
the questioner to that of the child. How often 
parents are puzzled by questions which chil- 
dren ask about their school work merely be- 
cause it is put in terms which they do not un- 
derstand. How often have I heard a parent 
say to a child, "Oh, is that what you meant?" 
which simply means that the school had one 



84 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

vocabulary of the subject and the parent an- 
other. But hardly less frequently the teacher 
has one vocabulary and the student another. 
Now, as stated, a part of this is inevitable. It 
must be bridged, if bridged at all, by the full- 
ness of the vocabulary of the child, since the 
child has no opportunity to place the teacher 
under examination. The rights, at present, 
are all on one side and the duties all on the 
other. 

The earliest years of life are the ones in 
which the mind is most eager and in which the 
inquiries come with least artificiality and with 
the greatest directness. That is the time to 
answer with the most abundant information, 
with the largest relationships and with the 
widest possible collaboration. For example, 
there is a war in progress and the names of 
places and the civilization of the contending 
nations are discussed at the breakfast table. 
That is the time to answer the child's question 
with the greatest possible fullness. It is a 
time not merely to answer with clearness and 
precision the thing called for, but to link it 
with the great variety of collateral things 
which are at that moment so related to the 
question asked as to enable the parent to teach 
simultaneously history, geography, manners, 
morals, language, philology and much more 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 85 

beside. Here again the outcry will be at 
once, "Oh, but we have not the equipment to 
do all this." My reply is, that this is non- 
sense, for even the daily newspapers, the best 
of them, do this very thing and it involves in 
its least capable form merely the intelligent 
gathering of special news articles and the 
careful reading of them, looking at a map 
and the intelligent and careful scrutiny of it 
and a walk to even the most meagerly 
equipped town library and the examination of 
the catalogue for a book or two on the sub- 
ject. All this should come out of a question 
brought forward under the circumstances in- 
dicated. The same thing is true concerning 
inventions or great events and is specially true 
concerning great personalities. 

It will be readily seen that later -on ques- 
tions in this field will instantly bring back the 
circumstances under which the information 
was originally gained, it will be allied with a 
great variety of miscellaneous information se- 
cured in connection with it and any question 
in this area by any outside agency will be in- 
terpreted not only in the light of what it ac- 
tually asks but in the light of the full infor- 
mation and the discussion in which it was first 
acquired. You have in fact given to the child 
a number of means of finding out, in case of 



86 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

doubt or ambiguity, what is probably re- 
quired. With little children the most trivial 
things can thus be linked with solid knowledge 
so that the results are almost beyond belief. 
Nor must all this be supposed to lead to, or 
necessarily involve, undue or unpleasant ma- 
turity on the part of the child. Any infor- 
mation which comes in a natural way is inter- 
esting and has the accompaniments which 
make it possible to be linked with what is al- 
ready in the child's mind. The fact that a 
child asks, "What kind of people are the 
Turks?" makes the natural background for 
finding out what induced that question and 
then putting in with strong and sumptuous 
liberality the background which will make 
that question, when asked again, luminous 
with many kinds of replies. To tell what 
kind of people the Turks are gives the natural 
opportunity for teaching history, for recall- 
ing inspiring romance, for dealing with fun- 
damental questions of morality and religion 
— the foundation problems of civilization and 
humanity. Why should it be postponed? I 
mention this particular example because I saw 
some years ago the question on a paper, "De- 
scribe the Turks." It does not require much 
imagination to picture the absurd confusion 
of the answers. So absurd a question invited 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 87 

the absurd replies which it received. But 
there was one child that told something of the 
Turkish Empire in Europe, something about 
Mohammed and Mohammedanism, something 
about the status of women in Oriental lands 
and finally a description of the Mosque of St. 
Sophia seen at a stereopticon exhibition. But 
it had absolutely nothing to do with what the 
teacher who asked the question had in mind. 

The psychology of this matter of question- 
ing is most interesting. A child's question is 
really an exhibit of its method and premier 
interests. When young children question, 
you have generally a simple idea and while 
it is in itself a simple idea, its form almost al- 
ways reveals the general notions and leading 
thoughts out of which it has come. When a 
child asks a perfectly stupid question, one 
which does not readily indicate out of what 
mental movements it arose or what soil gen- 
erated it, there is the very best of reasons for 
going at once into the business of finding out 
what is the matter with its fundamental men- 
tal operations, because children do not usually 
ask stupid questions. Sheer and absolute ig- 
norance does not ask stupid questions. Ab- 
solute innocence asks the directest questions 
possible without fear and without shame. 
Stupidity arises from confusion of ideas. 



88 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

And if this confusion is met with more con- 
fusion, you simply pile up trouble for the la- 
ter years of the student life. Such a situation 
should be met by intelligent questioning as to 
whence the original question, how induced, 
with what interest in mind, and, in fact, the 
bringing out of the entire mental furniture of 
the child into the open so that what is rubbish 
will readily reveal itself. Not to do this is 
to add to every subsequent handling of the 
theme elements which cannot possibly do 
otherwise than destroy clearness in thought or 
successful handling of knowledge gained. I 
know no region where greater stupidity pre- 
vails than in circles where it ought not to ex- 
ist, namely, academic assemblies, and I have 
very lately heard the president of a great uni- 
versity, seeing the discussion of the theme 
upon which he had spoken, take on a form 
which indicated either that he had mistaken his 
subject or the assembly was bent on discussing 
something else, rise in his place and explain 
to the hundreds of teachers present what he 
understood himself as having been invited to 
discuss and state that the discussion related 
to something quite different and proceed to 
talk about the subject de novo. Here you 
had evidently a question dubiously stated by 
the programme committee, its import misin- 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 89 

terpreted by a university president, an as- 
sembly of teachers failing to connect with the 
president's interpretation and finally an effort 
(not wholly successful as it appeared to me) 
to connect in the final stages of the discus- 
sion! And yet it related to a subject in 
which the whole academic world at this mo- 
ment is vitally interested. And yet we have 
the hardihood to mark down children for their 
failure to understand oftentimes what their 
teachers and examiners mean in their papers! 
The fact is, that questions and answers as- 
sume that the people asking and the people 
answering live within mental speaking dis- 
tance of each other. The university president 
just referred to was thinking of a dif- 
ferent world from that in which the great 
assembly of teachers were living. That was 
perfectly plain. After the first few moments 
they saw or felt that, and their minds refused 
to connect it with what they were thinking 
about most. This is exactly what happens 
with children when much so-called instruction 
takes place. The important thing is to get 
the mental touch which links the question to 
the interests, the personality of the child, and 
which admits of the utilization of previous 
knowledge and inquiry. Nowhere can this 
situation be secured with such perfection of 



90 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

detail, with such satisfactory and suggestive 
surroundings, as in the home. The natural 
affections, the habitual association of ideas, all 
tend to make an adequate and satisfactory 
framework for both the question and the an- 
swer. And the comparison of question and 
answer instantly opens other avenues of infor- 
mation, and few occasions of such intercourse 
stop with a single question. What happens 
is, that one thing leads to another and before 
that question is disposed of, many other 
things have been opened for inspection, more 
and other questions have been raised and the 
foundation has been laid for a resumption of 
the instruction at another time. There is an- 
other rather important distinction between 
questioning at school and questioning at home, 
the influence of which is significant in the 
development of a child's mental life. An- 
swering at school contemplates as a rule sim- 
ply accuracy, namely, satisfaction of the 
supposed desire of the instructor. But ques- 
tioning in the home takes on the aspect 
of a search for truth as distinguished from 
mere accuracy. It is not unknown both in 
school and college for young people to come 
to understand that this or that teacher requires 
certain replies to certain questions. Indeed 
many such "standard" answers are handed 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 91 

down from one class to another, constructions 
of particular passages in Latin, peculiarities 
in pronunciation, habits of emphasis and the 
like. In nearly every large college it is pos- 
sible to buy from certain persons who have 
them for sale, the ready-made materials for 
passing examinations in some courses because 
the kind of answer demanded is well defined 
and well known. All that is required is that 
the "right" answers shall be given. But this 
is not the case when it comes to the interplay 
of the parental and the filial mind. Here the 
subject is up because of its intrinsic interest 
to one or the other party to the interrogatory. 
If it begins with the child, the parent by rea- 
son of interest in the advancement of the 
child's knowledge and culture, will make the 
most of the opportunity to give much infor- 
mation and give it with reference to the total 
life of the child and especially as a veracious 
foundation for judgment, for comparison 
and future light. Mere correctness gives 
place to a larger ideal of the matter in hand. 
If it originates with the parent, the child will 
naturally also presume that the subject itself 
is invested with importance and interest ut- 
terly apart from his ability or inability to fur- 
nish a correct answer. This creates a totally 
different situation and one in which the ra- 



92 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

tional search for truth is begun and which, 
persisted in, creates a habit of intellectual ve- 
racity which is as important an adjunct to the 
intellectual life as knowledge itself and per- 
haps even more important. And it comes 
into the child's life associated with parental 
authority and habit, which is best of all. 

The art of answering questions is one which 
in cultivation has a decisive influence in train- 
ing the young mind to seek out the essential 
from the trivial or unessential elements of any 
given subject. The most simple inquiry may 
be answered in such a way as to leave a fine 
residuum in the mind of a child of deep re- 
spect for knowledge and pleasure in having 
elicited so weighty a result from so simple a 
question. Nothing makes a young mind glow 
with enthusiasm like the experience of seeing 
that a simple question has loosed a great 
stream of information and produced what the 
inquirer did not dream was involved when he 
spoke. Tapping a full mind is an exercise 
which yields great satisfaction both ways. 
For children it is a perennial source of delight 
and once experienced they will come back 
again and again with questions, if only for 
the pleasure of seeing what their questions 
will bring forth. Now out of this fullness 
there is a choice to be made. The wise and 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 93 

observant parent will make rapid analysis of 
what associations have brought out the ques- 
tion, he will select a few leading or striking 
things in connection with it and will leave cer- 
tain determinative marks upon the mind 
around which the less important details will 
readily group themselves. This is an easy 
enough process to the mature mind, but not 
so easy for the young. But seeing the thing 
done often and seeing discrimination made, 
the habit of discrimination speedily arises and 
the imitative faculty very soon asserts itself 
in the repetition of the phases, the attitudes 
of mind and expressions by which the choices 
are indicated. Thus a certain teacher who 
was in the habit of introducing almost every 
statement of fact by the phrase "in my judg- 
ment," soon found that his students were 
adopting it and very soon after that were 
giving evidence rather clearly that they 
were actually referring matters to the "judg- 
ment," meaning by this they were exercising 
the powers of discrimination which they pos- 
sessed and making replies which indicated se- 
lection instead of mere repetition. It does 
not require much thought to see what an 
enormous advance had been made when the 
children had learned that. 

Little children especially are fond of re- 



94 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

citals of personal experience and, themselves 
properly guided, offer beautiful narratives 
which are the most natural material one could 
desire for the training of the mind. I have 
known of a story composed by the children 
among whom it had its rise, to continue for 
several years, known among them as "The 
Story," in which each child in the nursery took 
its turn before they went to sleep in adding 
a chapter. To listen to this process was see- 
ing an example of the growth of pure and 
powerful narrative English which I have not 
seen matched anywhere. The story itself was 
enriched by suggestions by each of the four, 
by inquiry as to the reasonableness of this or 
that adventure, by promptings where the im- 
agination of one or the other was exhausted, 
by supplying of details, if for anyone there 
seemed to be a need of assistance in this direc- 
tion, correction by the older of the inaccura- 
cies, verbal or logical or practical, on the part 
of the younger, and so "The Story" went on 
for something like five years constantly aug- 
mented by the growing knowledge and expe- 
rience of all the children. It ceased only 
when the children grew old enough to occupy 
separate rooms. I often noticed while this 
story was going on, the method of asking 
questions and the replies which were made. I 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 95 

noticed the quick demand for reasonableness 
and coherence. I observed especially how a 
question induced by want of appreciation of 
the view-point of an older child by a younger, 
was accompanied by an explanation and ex- 
cursus which made the matter clear, and the 
story did not go on until this was done. In 
how many school rooms or homes is a subject 
held up, even when it is made the subject of 
formal inquiry and discussion, until there is 
absolute clarity in the point of view between 
the questioner and the questioned? And yet 
this is what these children demanded naturally 
from each other and what they received in 
response to that demand. I have rarely 
heard a stupid reply to a clear question among 
little children. I have often heard both 
stupid questions and stupid replies among 
adults. 

Obviously what has been said calls for a 
rigorous and intelligent choice of all the mate- 
rial which comes to the children of the home 
for the formation and nurture of their intel- 
lectual life. Such a censorship was long fore- 
seen and recalls a striking passage in the 
Republic of Plato: 

"You know also that the beginning is the 
chiefest part of any work, especially in a 
young and tender thing; for that is the time 



96 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

at which the character is being formed and 
most readily receives the desired impression. 

"Quite true. 

"And shall we just carelessly allow children 
to hear any casual tales which may be framed 
by casual persons and to receive into their 
minds notions which are the very opposite of 
those which are held by them when they are 
grown up? 

"We cannot. 

"Then the first thing will be to have a cen- 
sorship of the writers of fiction and let the 
censors receive any tale of fiction which is 
good and reject the bad; and we will desire 
mothers and nurses to tell their children the 
authorized ones only. Let them fashion the 
mind with these tales even more fondly than 
they form the body with their hands, and most 
of those which are now in use must be dis- 
carded." 

Here you have the principle, from a most 
ancient and honorable source, which should 
guide to-day even more than could possibly 
have been conceived as necessary then. If 
ever there was a call for censorship in the 
home as to what materials shall go into the 
mind stuff of its children there is such a call 
now. And this in the interest of a sound men- 
tal development is to be performed "even more 



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 97 

fondly" than we undertake the tasks of the 
care and development of the physical life. 
There is one way and one way only of finding 
out what impressions are being made upon 
children by what they read and what they 
hear. That way is by careful, painstaking 
and intelligent interrogation. It may be laid 
down as a general principle easily capable of 
verification that the subjects upon which chil- 
dren develop false, dangerous and often vi- 
cious ideas, are those upon which there has 
been no free inquiry on the part of parents 
and no free and honest answer on the part of 
children. 



My father trained me to avoid each vice by setting 
a mark on it by examples. Whenever he would ex- 
hort me to live a thrifty, frugal life contented with 
what he had saved for me, he would say, "Do you not 
see how hard it is for the son of Albius to live and 
how needy Barrus is a signal warning to prevent any- 
one from wasting his inheritance?" If he would de- 
ter me from dishonorable love, he would say, "Do not 
be like Sectanus" ; to save me from an adulterous 
passion when I might enjoy an unforbidden love, he 
used to say, "Trebonius' exposure was not credita- 
ble." Thus he molded my boyhood by these words. 
— Horace on Parental Teaching through Examples. 



THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 

When one of our great battleships re- 
cently was making her trial run for accept- 
ance by the government, I noticed the 
statement that the coal used on that occasion 
was all of a specially selected and hand-picked 
kind, chosen with a view to getting the maxi- 
mum of heat and sustained steam for the 
boilers and thus making the greatest speed 
possible. That incident may well stand as 
the suggestive illustration for the doctrine 
which this chapter is to set forth. If you will 
look about you, you will observe that what the 
shipbuilders did for their ship, broadly 
speaking, Nature is doing all the time. She 
seeks to produce the largest amount that she 
possibly can. She is jealous of anything 
that hinders her processes and employs every 
possible means to get around whatever stands 
in her way and get productiveness for the 
forces at work within her. Thus your flying 
seed finds the only spot in a wall that has a 
fragment of earth in it and germinates there. 
Something grows everywhere. No matter 

99 



100 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

how cold or how warm the climate happens to 
be, some form of life exists and thrives and 
modifies itself to suit the conditions and then 
propagates with all its might. Man is the 
only animal that is deliberately lazy that I 
know anything about and his laziness is, 
partly, a result. 

Ease of performance and delight in 
achievement both grow as they are made sim- 
pler of attainment, and simplicity is generally 
secured by the elimination of waste. It is 
highly probable that the most wasteful per- 
formance now going on among us is in educa- 
tion or, putting it otherwise, in brain power. 
I have already spoken of the neglect to furnish 
the materials for growth in the minds of chil- 
dren. But it is not enough simply to supply 
materials, it is also needful that waste material 
shall be steadily removed from the minds of 
children and room kept for the acquisition of 
fresh, new and more productive mental pabu- 
lum that the growing child shall constantly 
face something which challenges the maxi- 
mum of its ability and does not permit the 
habit of laziness, in whatever form it may dis- 
guise itself, to grow. 

Perhaps I can best illustrate this by what 
I know about elementary educational proc- 
esses as I have seen them at work in Boston. 



THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 101 

For years it was generally understood that the 
work in the fifth grade was not an advance 
upon the fourth grade, but was a sort of re- 
view and I know from my own observation 
that many a bright child under direction and 
observing parental guidance simply skipped 
that grade as a nuisance and waste of time. 
Many children, however, spent the year in 
that grade and in consequence formed habits 
of listlessness and inattention which years did 
not enable them to correct. I have observed 
also that certain forms of arithmetic and 
grammar and other studies, geography being 
also one, are taken several times first in a very 
crude, elementary form, then in a higher 
form, and finally in what is the last touch, 
before the grades are left. Now just why 
any subject should be taught more than once 
is to me an insoluble puzzle. Children can be 
taught square root for example once for all 
time. Why should they puzzle through it 
once haltingly and insecurely on the theory 
that they are going to have it more thoroughly 
later on? Why should they dabble with the 
metric system a little on one occasion, know- 
ing that they will have it more thoroughly 
later on? Why should not the metric system 
be learned once for all and then let the mind 
go on to something else? Unused knowledge 



102 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

is like unused furniture in storerooms, it may 
come in handy sometime, but most people 
know that it generally means that finally the 
stored things get so dirty or banged up that 
they are useless and finally sold as junk or 
given away. But this is exactly what we do 
with the minds of little children. We permit 
a mass of things to lumber up the mind and 
keep them pegging away on stuff which may 
or may not be useful sometime, and all the 
while are clogging the brain and preventing 
the free play of the mind on new and advanced 
material for the production of thought and 
the stimulation of efficiency. So much fun 
has been poked at the useless facts stuffed 
into children's minds about things which, 
when known, are of no particular use that 
that is not necessary here. 

If you want sustained mental power, you 
must have the mental powers kept free from 
hindrances in the shape of harassing wastes 
which clog the mind and prevent steady and 
enduring concentration. The damage which 
comes of waste in the mind is that it prevents 
concentration, and there is no surer way of 
destroying the powers of concentration, so 
called, than by permitting things to linger in 
the mind which have no business there. It is 
this habit, which so often causes a phenome- 



THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 103 

non, with which most parents are perfectly 
familiar. A child, up to a certain point, 
seems to be developing naturally and satis- 
factorily; he is interested in his work and 
seems to be gaining knowledge and self-con- 
trol and otherwise making real and substan- 
tial progress. All of a sudden he stops from 
no cause that can be discerned and gets care- 
less, listless and ceases to be interested in his 
work. Inquiry will usually reveal that by 
easy stages minor and useless things have 
diverted the mind from its original quest. It 
will be found that the mind is clogged with a 
mass of stuff which prevents the student from 
giving himself to the particular thing which 
it is his duty to give his mind to, and the re- 
sult is the "slump" described. Under such 
circumstances there is absolutely nothing to 
be done but to build up the interest anew by 
taking out what is clogging the stream of in- 
terest, laboriously dredging out what is hin- 
dering the free and unrestrained current of 
mental power and attention and making pos- 
sible the full use of the powers of the mind. 
There is hardly a better way of showing 
this kind of thing in action than to watch a 
pupil or a class "taking over" a year's work 
or a week's work or even a daily lesson. The 
reason why it is being taken a second time is 



104 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

usually because it was not mastered the first 
time. But what is the result? The student, 
instead of being shown what has happened, 
listlessly goes over the thing which he thinks 
he has already done and gets no farther and 
wastes his time another day or week or year 
as the case may be. In hundreds of cases 
which have come under my observation I have 
yet to find a case where anything substantial 
was gained by making students "take over" 
work which they supposed had once been per- 
formed. In such cases it is a time for prompt, 
decisive action. The thing must be mastered 
then and there and left. In fact, my own 
judgment is that it would be better to leave it 
entirely and supplement in other ways than 
drum along on the theory that nothing can be 
done till that thing has been performed. But 
this is itself a result. Wherever you get this 
experience it is very likely that the thought has 
become confused and concentration has become 
impossible by reason of the fact that waste 
things are clogging the otherwise free action 
of the mind. 

It is here that the necessity for clear and 
well-defined instruction becomes most appar- 
ent. Let an idea or a fact or a process come 
originally before the mind of a child, crisply 
outlined, decisively presented and effectively 



THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 105 

illustrated and it rarely needs to be told 
twice! The original conception being clear, 
all that remains is the application of what is 
clearly defined in the mind. But you listen to 
a teacher explaining the construction of an 
English sentence or a Latin one or a Greek 
one, and almost the first thing the mature 
mind is impressed with is the obscurity of the 
explanation. In fact, the explanation has 
often been more puzzling to me than the 
original sentence to be construed. I used to 
notice in the German schools the great differ- 
ence in this respect between them and the 
English schools, the former abounding in 
striking, determinative and boldly outlined 
definition, description and assertive explana- 
tion. The latter seemed to me heavy, in- 
volved and often so stupid that I wondered 
that children could listen at all. Now it was 
not that the children under this latter instruc- 
tion did not gain anything. The trouble was 
far more serious. The mind was being filled 
with waste stuff and the entire mental action 
was being clogged, hindered and hobbled. In- 
terest under such circumstances was impos- 
sible and I saw little. Or if interest was 
aroused, it was of a nature not complimentary 
to the instruction, as when I saw a youth pass 
a, paper, during one of these heavy disserta- 



106 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

tions to which nobody listened and which ob- 
viously bored everybody, which paper, being 
dropped, was picked up by me and I read 
with amusement the following illuminating- 
screed, "Bet you a quarter she don't know 
what she means herself." As a betting prop- 
osition it was worthless ; there could be no tak- 
ers on a matter so obviously one-sided. 

Every ill-defined idea and every confused 
notion put into young people's minds is sim- 
ply like dropping pebbles into cog wheels. 
Yet most of our text-books are witnesses that 
this process has been elevated into a fine art. 
I have in mind at this moment my own diffi- 
culties with the so-called problems in algebra. 
I venture the statement which thousands of 
sufferers with me will echo, that many, if not 
most, of the problems in algebra are not 
mathematical problems at all, but are puzzles 
in the English language, if such brutal stuff 
can be called language. I have proved again 
and again that once you state the equation, the 
student has no difficulty and this is the im- 
portant thing. But you muddle up things 
for the student till the main question becomes 
not one of mathematics but one of English, 
and it is supposed to be fine discipline for a 
young person to find out what under heaven 



THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 107 

the text-book maker was thinking about when 
he carefully hid away the elements of the 
question he sought to propound. One might 
just as well hide a needle and a spool of thread 
and a thimble about in a barn and set a 
little girl to find them and call it a lesson in 
sewing. For sheer stupidity and mental 
brutality, these so-called problems are prob- 
ably unmatched in the whole theory of educa- 
tion. They are the rock pile of youth, 
struggling toward mental power and self -con- 
sciousness. They might as well be sent to 
mental penal servitude at once and be done 
with it. Nobody will ever know the anguish 
which has been thus heaped upon helpless 
young people, who, under any rational deal- 
ing with exactly the same things, would have 
had not only interest but pleasure in perform- 
ing this work. I knew an old lady who in 
her old age and infirmity found recreation in 
charades, puzzle pictures and algebra prob- 
lems. The classification was both scientific- 
ally and practically sound. 

The waste, inherent in such a process of 
communicating knowledge, however, is hardly 
to be compared with that arising from the ac- 
quisition of useless and false information 
through the failure to create and maintain 



108 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

some programme for the coordination of the 
knowledge gained. One reason why the Bi- 
ble remains incontestably the best book for 
general culture and the most useful text-book 
for mental growth and maturity, is for just 
the reason that almost everything learned 
from it means that about fifty other things 
are learned at the same time. Knowledge of 
the English Bible, for example, means the en- 
trance into English literature by its widest 
and most interesting gate. It means the en- 
trance into history through its most fascinat- 
ing portals. It means the introduction to hu- 
man motives by means of the surest and most 
exacting standards. It means immediate, 
interesting and fertilizing touch with a thou- 
sand interests at once. And all these things 
come together at the time of life when the 
rudiments of criticism are being formed and 
lay the foundations for the best structural 
organization of the mind. Take the most 
arid portions of the Old Testament and there 
is no waste in their acquisition, and now that 
the Bible has a place among the books which 
may be offered among the English require- 
ments for admission to college, there is a util- 
ity about it for that purpose also. There is 
no waste in any of this material. Hence the 
Bible remains the most fruitful book for the 



THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 109 

purpose of training children and youth, and, 
properly done, does other things of even more 
importance than those indicated. 

But similar results may be secured in the 
intelligent choice of other materials. There 
is a choice, is there not, in giving a child a toy 
which excites not the slightest effort or one 
that causes inquiry into what makes it go? 
There is a choice, is there not, in the kind of 
activities to which a child is directed? The 
perpetually recurring question of young chil- 
dren is, "What shall I do?" That is the op- 
portunity of the parent and the choice there 
may be of a character which will fill with se- 
lected, intensively productive matter the in- 
quiring young mind. What most people do, 
is to throw anything that comes handy to the 
child and get rid of thinking about it. But 
this question, while not vocalized, in exactly 
the same way goes on through the earlier 
years of life. Boys and girls while not ask- 
ing the question, may be led, directed and en- 
riched some of the time without their knowing 
it. And all the time their standards of taste 
may be raised, their interests widened, their 
abilities for choice made stronger and their 
selective habits clarified all along the line. 
The degree to which this is carefully done, is 
also the degree to which waste materials are 



110 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

kept out of the child's life and mind and 
worth-while things substituted. 

In the country village where I am writing 
this, there is a man who for years has done 
here what every parent and teacher should do. 
This genial lover of his kind, until infirmity 
prevented him from continuing his practice, 
used to go to the village library, when it was 
opened for the drawing of books on Satur- 
day afternoon, and lounge around the place 
watching the boys and girls as they came to 
draw books. Friendly with them always, he 
used to note their perplexity, and answer be- 
fore it was uttered the question, "What shall 
I get?" by a suggestion here* and a' bit of in- 
formation there, and by easy stages he got the 
young people to read desirable things and has 
for years done a most valuable work of which 
the young people who grew up under that 
practice are at this moment not even aware. 
One result is that more young people in this 
village take higher education than is probably 
the case in any village of its size for miles 
around. This man was simply preventing 
mental waste. Left to themselves the young 
people would have filled their minds with fic- 
tion simply, and probably not the best of that. 
As it was they got biography, travel, history, 



THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 111 

natural science and politics. That is exactly 
the plan which ought to be inaugurated in 
every household in the land. The collateral 
result which this has on scholarship is one of 
the tilings which should not be overlooked 
either. The cheap and useless stuff, tons of 
which are printed every year as "children's 
books," is not only worthless as fertilizing 
matter, but it is full of misinformation. I 
lately looked over such a book, which was well 
printed and of a make-up which will insure its 
purchase by thousands of well-to-do people, 
in the interest of the mental life of their chil- 
dren. It happened to deal with a portion of 
the country with which I am well acquainted. 
Simply in glancing through this book, I 
counted thirty-one errors of fact. I know 
plenty of books on the same subject far more 
interesting and full of solid historical mate- 
rial which an intelligent choice would have 
substituted for this volume. The children 
who read this book, supposing they are deal- 
ing with actual history, will find their mental 
furnaces choked with slag and be perpetually 
bothered to find out that what they have been 
accepting as fact is in reality falsehood. A 
right choice at that time would have given the 
mental furnace selected, hand-picked coal 



112 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

from a scholar's mind and generated in the 
mental machinery substantial power for years 
to come. 

Prompt substitution of advanced material 
for material thoroughly digested and under- 
stood is another element in the successful elim- 
ination of waste. When do we discard one 
size of shoes for a child and get a larger size? 
When the shoes are outgrown of course. But 
I have seen children wearing the baby shoes 
of their minds long after they had outgrown 
them. It is a pleasant sensation to dwell 
upon what one knows thoroughly and as 
thoroughly likes. Children in this respect 
are not unlike adults who love to read and re- 
read their favorite authors. Now if the au- 
thor is worth reading more than once, that is 
one thing. But this is rarely the case with 
children's books, and when a child persistently 
is found reading the same thing over and over 
again, it simply indicates that the absence of 
mental effort involved in that process is 
breeding laziness and that the mind is stag- 
nating. Then promptly something more 
stimulating and more exacting should be sub- 
stituted. Here again the Bible is an excep- 
tion, because almost every text in the Bible has 
been commented upon so extensively that con- 
stant contact provokes increasing reflection 



THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 113 

and inquiry, which is of course the end of all 
mental effort. But there should be a con- 
stant and steady taking out and fresh putting 
in of materials which call for exertion and at- 
tention so that these faculties of exertion and 
attention may be kept up to their full possi- 
bilities. 

One reason why the excessive reading of 
certain kinds of newspapers is mentally so 
very damaging to all people, young or old, is 
that it dissipates the mental powers, causes 
the mind to dwell indiscriminately upon im- 
portant and unimportant things and destroys 
the sense of proportion. The critical facul- 
ties are thus dulled and finally lost. One gets 
of course a "nose for news," but few people 
who have any important business on hand, ex- 
cept in professions where "a nose for news" 
is a necessary tool for efficiency, have any use 
for this kind of a "nose." But the thing can 
be done with books as successfully as with 
newspapers. The ability to think consecu- 
tively and the power of sustained thought in 
any given direction can be lost quite as surely 
in a library as in a newspaper reading room. 
When people say what one often hears, "I 
never could remember which was which" or 
"I never was good at that sort of thing," and 
such-like expressions, they merely mean that 



114 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

at the time when these things ought to have 
been given to them clearly, definitely and with 
clarified assertiveness, the stream of thought 
was muddy with other things and they simply 
got tangled up with a miscellaneous lot of 
other information, true, false and mixed. 
These persons have lost even the power of say- 
ing frankly what is the simple truth, "I do not 
know." This confusion arises from the hab- 
its which have been described above and from 
the want of a clarified, prepared mind to re- 
ceive what is offered. 

The art of making everything tell toward 
a given result is another of the things to be 
noted in keeping the mind filled with fertile 
instead of wasteful matter. There is scarcely 
a subject which does not in the hands of a 
mature person, who is interested in the work, 
admit of endless development illustratively 
and otherwise. Now the more things you 
link with any important fact, the more you 
convince, first, of its importance, and, second, 
the more surely you give it its fixed place in 
the mental furniture. In dealing with young 
people, my habit has always been to tell every- 
thing I knew about the topic under discussion. 
If I knew little, I made it my business to find 
out more. But the outstanding impression I 
always sought to leave, was that the thing had 



THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 115 

infinite possibilities and that there was a great 
deal about it to be learned which was as inter- 
esting or even more interesting than that 
which I had already communicated. That is 
exactly what an advertisement seeks to do — 
to persuade you to investigate and finally buy 
the goods advertised. That is just what the 
publisher's prospectus does about the book he 
wants you to buy. As a teacher, I advertise 
the wares I have to offer. I am not above 
making my subject as interesting as I can and 
showing that there is going to be a great loss 
to my students if they don't take what I offer 
them. The lure of knowledge is the most 
fascinating game in the world. The child 
mind, eager, ready and anxious to be filled, 
follows any leader who has the capacity to 
lead. The deplorable fact is that this is a 
period when we give the children lies of all 
kinds — lies about religion, lies about social 
facts, lies about the family, lies about life and 
lies about everything that has importance and 
relation to sane and sound living later on. Of 
course the people who do all this do not call 
them lies. They invent other fictitious terms 
but the simple fact remains that falsehoods 
are substituted for the truth. By and by the 
falsehoods are discovered to be such and then 
comes the tragedy of the dropping out of the 



116 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

moral underpinning, the loss of confidence in 
those who should command it most. But the 
truth is not less interesting than the substitutes 
for it, interesting as some of these are. Cer- 
tainly if the same skill were expended in tell- 
ing true and great things that is now wasted in 
things worthless and false, the result would be 
astounding. 

Reference must be made again here to the 
Bible because it illustrates the point bettei 
than any other book. Your child wants a 
story. A very little study will embellish 
with side lights and historical illustration al- 
most any part of the Biblical narrative, and 
you have the best mind stuff imaginable. For 
older boys and girls, the interpretive word as 
a mature person is able to give it will acclima- 
tize in the mind of very young people the clas- 
sic authors and give them a permanent place 
in the intellectual affections. Anybody can 
prove this by simply trying it. And by so 
much as this programme succeeds, waste is 
cast out and the ground firmly and fruitfully 
occupied. 

This process has one further and interest- 
ing result. Parents who employ it will find 
themselves growing skillful in anticipating 
possible error and preventing misconceptions 
developing, and will find themselves organiz- 



THE ELIMINATION OF WASTE 117 

ing their own knowledge in a way, which, 
without this plan, they are hardly likely to do. 
The path of knowledge, like the path of the 
just, shineth more and more unto the perfect 
day. Soon there develops between parent 
and child a mutuality of understanding, an 
aptitude of appreciation and apprehension of 
meaning, and out of this arises a dialectic 
which is one of the best results of the entire 
programme. Steadily there begin to recur 
the little tests of skill, trials of power and 
comparisons of judgment, by reason of the 
fact that the child's mind becomes aware of 
itself, in contrast to the mature mind, and at 
the same time begins to take the measure of 
the mind which is guiding and controlling it. 
It may not be with some parents an uninter- 
esting collateral result, that they are taught 
quite as much as the child. But in any case, 
the worthy occupation of the mind is achieved 
and that of itself makes certain noxious forms 
of mental development impossible. 



The greatest reverence is due to a child! If you 
are contemplating a disgraceful act, despise not your 
child's tender years, but let your infant son act as a 
check upon your purpose of sinning. For, if at 
some future time he shall have done anything to de- 
serve the censor's wrath and show himself like you 
not in person only and face but also the true son of 
your morals and one who by following in your foot- 
steps adds deeper guilt to your crimes, then for- 
sooth ! you will reprove and chastise him with clamor- 
ous bitterness and then set about altering your will. 
Yet how dare you assume the front severe and license 
of a parent's speech, you who yourself though old do 
worse than this, and the exhausted cupping glass is 
long ago looking out for your brainless head? 

— Juvenal, on Discipline by Parents. 



VI 
HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 

In undertaking to talk about the imagina- 
tion one must always be cautious, yet some 
things seem to be pretty well established now 
by psychological science which it is worth 
while to consider in the very practical and in- 
teresting business of rearing children. Im- 
agination in children is one of the most pow- 
erful influences moving them, and to leave so 
powerful an instrument entirely without reg- 
ulation, use and utilization seems like a great 
waste and, in fact, it is an absolutely unpar- 
donable waste. Professor James in his great 
work on psychology quotes Galton as saying, 
after finding that most "men of science" pro- 
tested that mental imagery was unknown to 
them, the following, "On the other hand, when 
I spoke to persons whom I met in general so- 
ciety I found an entirely different disposition 
to prevail. Many men and yet a larger num- 
ber of women and many hoys and girls de- 
clared that they habitually saw mental 
imagery and that it was perfectly distinct to 
them and full of color." This led to investi- 

119 



120 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

gations which proved the truth of a declaration 
made by boys and girls absolutely without sci- 
entific training or interests and established, by 
this means, a most important element to be 
kept in mind in the rearing and mental training 
of young children, of which comparatively lit- 
tle use is made for the higher intellectual life. 
Moreover, this imaginative power is not at all 
connected with vision. Again he says, "In- 
telligent children take pleasure in introspection 
and strive their very best to explain their men- 
tal processes. I think the delight in self -dis- 
section must be a strong ingredient in the 
pleasure that many are said to take in con- 
fessing to priests." 

So much for the science of the thing. On 
the practical side the facts are very clear and 
easily verifiable in any household where there 
are "intelligent" children, which does not mean 
exceptional children or children highly gifted 
in one way or another, but children who are 
well and able to take the ordinary child's part 
in household life. The imaginative life of a 
child is usually regarded by parents and ma- 
ture people merely as a pleasant source of 
amusement and not as a tool for the child's 
future development. And not a few persons 
to whom one mentions the idea of utilizing the 
imagination are repelled by the thought as in 



HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 121 

some way robbing the child of something pe- 
culiarly pleasurable and which is the child's 
very own and, therefore, not to be interfered 
with. To "harness" the imagination, there- 
fore, will very naturally strike many persons 
who read this book as an unpleasant bit of 
utilitarianism. It springs from exactly the 
same feeling which persists in letting children 
misuse words because they are "cunning" and 
indulge in baby talk because it is "cute." Of 
course the difficulties which are thus inte- 
grated into the child's mental fixtures to make 
trouble in the future are not considered. But 
then serious consideration for children's intel- 
lectual growth is one of the things American 
parents have yet to learn. 

In a certain nursery with which I am very 
well acquainted there are upward of thirty 
dolls of all sizes and descriptions. Probably 
the whole collection with the single exception 
of a large French doll, a gift to the children 
of this nursery, could be replaced for less than 
two dollars. But the value of that collection 
of dolls to the intellectual life and training of 
the children who have and still use them can 
hardly be overestimated. Their names will 
prove their peculiar relation to the intellectual 
interest alluded to, comprising, as they do, 
Cleopatra, Julius Csesar, Mark Hanna, King 



122 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

Edward and Queen Alexandra, Lucy and 
Mary (standing in this case for Lusitania 
and Mauretania, the great steamships), Jupi- 
ter, Cupid, John Harvard and a great many 
others. Here is certainly a very diversified 
company and they all stand for something in 
particular. Now, names have figured very 
largely in the history of all the great human 
interests. Religion, for example, especially 
among primitive races and the earlier nations, 
can be worked out almost entirely from the use 
of divine names. Names usually connote 
events and principles and standards of con- 
duct or relations of one kind and another, all 
of which are the raw materials of thought and 
springs of action. Every one of the names 
in the above list is distinctly connected 
with the set of ideas which the chil- 
dren who own these dolls had gained and 
which they thought worth while to give 
permanent form. The external representa- 
tions were made in accord with these ideas, 
but, as a matter of fact, in this group 
there was gathered a large fund of knowledge 
which has been useful in many other ways al- 
ready and will be useful in still others yet to 
appear. For example, the name of Cleopa- 
tra is distinctly connected with certain stories 
of Egypt which led directly to the investiga- 



HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 123 

tion of other stories about Egypt and left a 
rather good outline of that land and its his- 
tory in the minds of these children with a va- 
riety of detail which would not be discredit- 
able in most mature people. I recall very 
well when Cleopatra broke her head and by 
reason of the studies to which her personality 
had led, she was "embalmed" (another avenue 
of information fruitful in many directions) 
in a compound of olive oil, cloves, cinnamon 
and other ingredients which I do not now re- 
call. While she was being buried, a Dart- 
mouth professor happened into the home as 
guest and, seeing this procession going on and 
inquiring into the reasons for it, proceeded to 
give a lecture on Egyptian life and habits 
and customs, as he had seen them, which 
has crystallized permanently a mass of addi- 
tional information about Egypt in the minds 
of all the children. "Mark Hanna" was rather 
fully discussed one day at the dinner table in 
connection with an exciting political cam- 
paign in which he figured. His political 
generalship, his astuteness and his general 
representative character made a sufficient im- 
pression to cause a new little doll to be named 
for him. But the doll has also permanently 
embodied in the minds of the children the com- 
plete history of a political campaign with 



124 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

numerous incidents of American public life, 
questions of public morality which have al- 
ready had and must have an increasing influ- 
ence on their thought about these things as 
they become more experienced and mature. 
"John Harvard" came so early and has had so 
great an influence that the question of college 
education and preparation for it has never 
been discussed by these children except as to 
the probable date of entrance. "Lucy" and 
"Mary" were born out of an extensive discus- 
sion of ocean travel, of the rise, development 
and expansion of steamship transportation 
and probably brought into the minds of the 
children all they were able to contain about 
that subject. They are the visible symbols of 
a distinctly understood scientific enterprise. 

Now that is what I call harnessing the im- 
agination. In this case it happened to be 
dolls. But it happened also with kittens who 
bore the names respectively of Siegfried, 
Tigris-Euphrates and Peter! It is a per- 
fectly safe statement that from the doll, 
"Helen of Troy," these children at a very early 
age got a full, complete and accurate account 
of the "Iliad" and a large section of Greek 
history. "Scipio Africanus" in the shape of 
a particularly handsome cat more than justi- 
fied his existence by the increment which he 



HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 125 

brought to the children's knowledge. I have 
known a pet frog to embody in his title, which 
for obvious reasons I cannot give, the per- 
sonality and outstanding characteristics of a 
well-known town character. Now all this 
was using the imagination so to speak, for all 
it was worth. It gave practical things to 
play with, and it also stirred the mind and 
stored the memory with things which were in- 
tellectually fertilizing and distinctly valuable. 
All that it required was somebody at hand to 
furnish the material and the children did the 
rest. The imagination was made a distinct 
adjunct to knowledge-getting and with this 
knowledge were laid the foundations for ca- 
pacity and power of comparison in a great 
many ways. I should like to know whether 
this was not quite as childlike and whether it 
was not infinitely more valuable than the 
Jessies, Fannies and Bessies and what not, 
with absolutely no accompanying story? To 
be sure, these children had their "Maries" and 
their "Lillians" who were simply creations 
with no history. But it remains true that the 
historical characters have been the abiding 
ones and they are the ones which have enriched 
the storehouse of memory and knowledge. 
They also have been the ones which have fur- 
nished the greatest pleasure. This linking of 



126 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

the imaginative life with the sources of knowl- 
edge is one of the most fruitful fields in the 
intensive training of children. 

As Galton says, children love to recall and 
recount the stories with which the experiences 
which come to them are connected. And if 
these stories are allied to something of intrin- 
sic worth and interest the gain is just so much 
greater. But I know of very little use be- 
ing made of this vast power which is pecul- 
iarly strong in children and which is also in 
children exceptionally active. History be- 
gun in this way will be a perennial source of 
delight as long as the brain works. The field 
for mental enrichment and expansion is by 
this tool made almost unlimited. And it can 
readily be seen what an advantage is gained 
by a child so trained. Names connected with 
stories learned in childhood and stored in the 
memory take away the strangeness of these 
tilings when encountered later on, and not 
only so, but are met as old friends with whom 
a pleasant relationship is resumed. They 
start streams of thought in many directions. 
They open countless conjectures about men, 
manners and habits of life. They make, al- 
most without effort, schemes of life and 
contrasts of appearance, behavior and ideals 
of achievement, which become principles of 



HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 127 

action and almost determine the intellectual 
interests of later life. Children so trained 
are immune to the cheap and vulgar appeals 
to their imaginative life, and the ordinary 
"comic" has nothing for them except a mo- 
ment's idle examination for the idea, which, 
usually absent, leaves only disgust for the bar- 
renness of so much effort expended without 
result. From what I saw thus developed in 
my own nursery, I turned to others, and have 
for twenty years taken pleasure in examining 
what was going on in the nurseries of the 
homes to which I have had access. I have 
watched the life of children and have over and 
over again proved that children left untouched 
and untrained in this department of their life 
suffer a great loss. And I have demon- 
strated to my own satisfaction, at least, that 
almost any child will take up almost any kind 
of material and assimilate it. I have in 
mind at this very moment a household which 
rather prided itself upon the fact that it was 
"untainted" with any religion. Romping 
with its children on one occasion, I told, in a 
resting interval, the story of David and 
Goliath without mentioning its Biblical 
source. A few days later coming up the 
front walk of that home with the father 
of my young friends, many inches taller 



128 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

than I, we were instantly hailed as 
"David and Goliath," and I was called 
David by those children ever after. That led 
to results in the use of the Bible in that home 
which have been nothing short of revolution- 
ary. The boy who was attracted by that 
story is now a minister of the gospel and links 
the transformation of his life and that of his 
home with the fact that I caught his imagina- 
tion with a historic tale, which, when he grew 
to appreciate its significance, caused a spirit- 
ual revolution. But there is nothing spe- 
cially new in this. The spiritual revolutions 
of history have generally found their sources 
in the stories which, heard in childhood, have 
roused the imagination and become crystallized 
into principles of action. A distinguished 
American who has made a national reputation 
as a criminal prosecutor told me that, when a 
famous railroad wrecker had caused the loss 
of his father's fortune, the effort of his 
mother to explain their change of life by tell- 
ing the story not of the family wrongs but of 
the injustice of such proceedings, making ab- 
stract for her small boy what they were ex- 
periencing in the concrete, set his imagina- 
tion on fire to be a sword of vengeance against 
evil doers of this kind. He never got away 
from that early impression. To-day his 



HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 129 

name is a terror to certain great interests 
which are unjustly employing their privileges 
and power to the people's disadvantage. 
Again and again he has been approached to 
give his brilliant mind to the legal defense 
of some of these interests. But when the 
temptation has come, he has heard that primi- 
tive imaginative note of righteous indignation 
and he remains the unpurchasable advo- 
cate of righteousness and justice. The his- 
tory of the courts in this land has literally 
been changed by that swaying of the imagina- 
tion of a child. The country has not a few 
persons who are figuring large in its institu- 
tional life who have derived their inspiration 
and bent in the same way. Their imaginative 
life was early harnessed to definite human 
conceptions and made not only their own his- 
tory but in no inconsiderable degree the life 
and history of their fellow-men. 

My small boys very early manifested what 
is quite common in small boys, the love of 
arms and armor and weapons and combat. 
By a little direction their shields became or- 
namented with crosses and their battles be- 
came crusades and their exercise in this way 
transformed into an instrument of historic 
and ethical culture. This was long before 
the idea had been embodied in an organiza- 



130 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

tion for boys which now does this thing in 
connection with church work for boys. My 
own impression is that to organize this idea 
in that way would tend to destroy its useful- 
ness, but, in any case, others have seen its util- 
ity for moral and spiritual cultivation. What 
I am seeking to lay down here, is the principle 
that the imagination needs and should receive 
at a very early stage, direction, and the mea- 
ger equipment of the child supplemented and 
furnished, where the need exists, with a body 
and a content. All such additions to the ma- 
terials for imaginative reflection are sheer 
gain. It is literally getting something for 
nothing, for it creates something where noth- 
ing was before and gives the little mind some- 
thing to work on and toward, which is usually 
just what the young mind wants. I venture 
to say that with all the increase in children's 
books and the forms of child teaching and 
guidance and with the enormous awakening 
of the formative importance of childhood, yet 
there is no subject to which so little attention 
is given by the responsible persons as to this 
matter of directing and controlling what goes 
into the minds of children and what happens 
to it, when it is there. It is important to see 
to it that a child gets food. But its digestion 
must also be watched. Exactly the same rule 



HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 131 

applies to the mind. We must not merely see 
to it that the right things are brought before 
it. We must direct and assist in its assimi- 
lation and see that every need is supplied and 
that the processes of growth, and with this 
the formative ideas and ideals, are carefully 
directed, sometimes stimulated, sometimes re- 
strained, but in every case directed. 

Training and directing a child's imagina- 
tion has another aspect which is of importance 
in its mental development. Habits of atten- 
tion and concentration are, broadly speaking, 
the surest tests of the real strength or weak- 
ness of the mind. Now, habits of attention 
are developed by interest, of which something 
more will be said later on. But attention will 
be held when the inward interest, called im- 
agination, most strongly allies itself with the 
outward process of creating interest. The 
objective of creating the habit of attention is 
the important thing. It almost always may 
be secured when the imaginative elements are 
properly directed and controlled. And thus 
very early is begun the concentration of mind 
which is so necessary a feature of sound men- 
tality. The right use of the imagination in- 
stead of being a hindrance to concentration 
is actually the best means of securing it. This 
is the case because the interest is spontaneous, 



132 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

because it is not projected upon the child 
from without, has its rise not from something 
outside of itself but something within craving 
utterance and expression. What concerns 
the child itself will always receive some kind 
of attention and what concerns itself, linked 
with some other allied interest, secures the 
same kind and degree of attention and concen- 
tration for that allied interest that it gives to 
itself. Every time you link some bit of per- 
manent knowledge, some fragment of litera- 
ture, some incident of history, some discovery 
of science, with some distinct imaginative in- 
terest of the child, you have planted a seed 
which is sure to be fruitful in many ways. 
This is why the songs which mothers sing to 
their children exercise such a tremendous 
after-influence in the lives of children who 
have been thus favored. They hear the song, 
often they learn a story; they link that story 
with the sweetest and dearest affection of the 
heart and thus soldiers and poets, heroes and 
scoundrels, are created in the very arms of the 
mothers! A friend of mine told me that he 
believed certain moral derelictions had been 
denuded of their moral hideousness because 
in early boyhood he had heard them treated 
lightly in a drinking song which he had heard 
his father sing. 



HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 133 

If the harnessed imagination is an instru- 
ment of power, the unharnessed imagination 
is even seven times more destructive as a 
power making for mental disintegration and 
discursiveness. The danger of letting the 
imagination wander without direction and 
control was very early perceived by church- 
men who have left a very large body of liter- 
ature on the subject. They were thinking, of 
course, only on the subject of the moral and 
spiritual results of letting the mind dwell 
fondly on unlawful pleasures and indul- 
gences. But the lawlessness of action, bred 
by wanton indulgence of the imagination in 
matters moral, is more than matched by the 
anarchy bred in the mind by permitting ideas 
to flit into and about the mind without context 
and without purpose. When a man indulges 
in day-dreams and finds himself unable to fix 
his mind upon the things he is set to do, it 
simply indicates that he has not the will power 
to control his imagination on the one hand or 
a misdirected imagination on the other. Per- 
haps the two things are not very different. 
But this process may be seen in its beginnings 
at an early age. It is seen in commands by 
parents which are unheeded, by instructions 
which are forgotten, by negligence in a thou- 
sand different directions where the uncon- 



134 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

trolled imagination has run away with the ac- 
tuality. The habit of lying by children often 
is exactly this and nothing more. An un- 
harnessed imagination is the best soil possible 
for every kind of moral delinquency, but it is 
also the effective agent of mental inefficiency. 
This arises from the fact that unless connected 
with verifiable things, linked to matters which 
have distinct relation to life and actuality, 
with the remaining activities of the mind, the 
sense of accuracy and veracity is impaired or 
destroyed. Nearly everyone knows what it is 
to think about a thing so long and so long- 
ingly that it comes to be regarded as real. 
The number of persons who thus deceive 
themselves about themselves, the world and 
the things around them is legion. There is 
probably not one man in a thousand who has 
made a failure in life but the almost direct rea- 
son for which was that he had been living in 
an imaginative world of falsehoods concern- 
ing himself and his capabilities instead of a 
world of realities brightened and directed by 
a controlled imagination. Naturally what can 
cast so strong a glow over life as an aroused 
imagination has the same power for doing evil 
that it has for doing good. 

Here again I have a striking illustration in 
mind. A youth who was a contemporary of 



HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 135 

mine in boyhood and who was skillful with 
pen and pencil was very early led to imagine 
himself "destined" to become a great artist. 
Foolish parents and unfaithful friends per- 
mitted this imaginative "destiny" to grow into 
a fixed belief without being scrutinized and 
brought under the control of severe training 
and exacting tests by competent and disinter- 
ested persons. The result has been a pathetic 
figure in life. And the worst feature of it is 
that, in the opinion of persons who are qual- 
ified to know, if this young boy had been 
trained for draftsmanship, he might have be- 
come not merely a useful and successful man, 
but might also have attained what he im- 
agined he was destined to be by nature. He 
has missed his ideal and he has missed useful- 
ness both. I take it that this was due almost 
entirely to the fact that he was permitted 
to indulge his imagination without control. 
There are thousands of music students who 
flock to the great cities annually with the same 
delusions. They are led on by an unwise and 
sometimes dishonest counsel and end in con- 
fusion and cruel disillusionment. The great 
cities are full of such people. Now the time 
to get acquainted with reality, even in the 
realm of the imagination, is childhood. This 
does not mean the destroying of dreams, it 



136 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

does not mean that high hopes are to be 
dashed ruthlessly to the ground, that the beau- 
tiful visions of youth are to be crushed with- 
out pity by the sober, matured experience and 
wisdom of age, but it does mean that nobody 
who is truly loyal to his children will permit 
them to grow up with an habitually wander- 
ing mind and playing forever or at all with 
illusions which have no solid foundations on 
the earth. It is all right to hitch your wagon 
to a star, but one must be very sure that it is 
a star and not a will-o'-the-wisp. They look 
very much alike at times! And a star to 
which you can hitch is a harnessed star in any 
case! 

In this matter the mind is very much like 
an aeroplane. Getting into the air is com- 
paratively simple. It is a question of how 
and where you will come down that makes the 
experiment worth while and safe and inter- 
esting. Otherwise it would be just as well to 
jump off the roof of a twenty-five-story 
building. The old idea was to let the mind 
just wander and then rely that the beautiful 
dreams of childhood, being a free and delight- 
ful and irresponsible flight in the fairyland of 
youth, by and by would be abandoned for 
solider and more substantial things. But the 
sober truth is that the disorganization of the 



HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 137 

mind, left for any considerable period with- 
out responsible control, tends to destroy con- 
trol altogether and makes the resumption of 
control, when direction is desired, a very seri- 
ous matter. We live in a world of law. The 
law of the mind is no less a law when it has 
to do with intangible things than when it is 
dealing with material matters. In children 
this is especially necessary because the line be- 
tween actuality and imagination is so faintly 
outlined in any case. Nobody would dream 
of letting a little child go out into the street 
on a cold winter morning in its night-dress 
because, looking out upon the sunlit, snow- 
covered landscape and believing it a fairyland, 
the child proposed to go out without sufficient 
clothing. To permit this would be called in- 
sanity on the part of the parents. But is it 
any less irrational to permit children to take 
their illusions into the realities of life without 
guidance and without control? This also I 
call harnessing the imagination. It is saying 
"Whoa" to unreality and vision when they 
tend to destroy the sense of clearness and to 
mislead the mind. Upon some of the most 
important human interests in the world at 
this moment, the vast majority of parents are 
saying absolutely not a word to the unbridled 
and uninstructed imagination of their chil- 



138 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

dren. I refer, of course, to matters of sex. 
And for this neglect we are reaping a fearful 
crop of immoralities which could have been 
avoided by the principle of harnessing im- 
agination and making this most important 
faculty of the mind a help instead of a hin- 
drance to sound mental development. 

"The use of traveling," says Dr. Johnson, 
"is to regulate imagination by reality and in- 
stead of thinking how things may be to see 
them as they are." Now children cannot be 
great travelers. But they can be given the 
result of much mental journeying by the 
guidance and instruction of mature and 
trained minds. And this function, both for 
enriching on the one hand and for restraining 
on the other, belongs of right and duty to the 
parents who should take the childhood equiv- 
alent for traveling, namely, the use of the 
imagination, well in hand and so link the re- 
ality with the dream that the strength of one 
and the glow of the other will both be re- 
tained. Let the child-mind glow all it wants 
to glow and let it shine with all the brilliance 
of which it is capable. But let us take care 
that it does not produce sunstroke or confla- 
gration. It is easy to burn up the mind of a 
child by the extinction of the sense of reality. 
It is easier even to cause it to be blighted into 



HARNESSING THE IMAGINATION 139 

listlessness and incapacity by becoming over- 
heated with illusions and dreaming. The re- 
sponsibility for either calamity must be taken 
by the earliest guides and teachers of the child. 
A harnessed imagination is likely to emerge 
in a chastened steady glow which illuminates 
without burning and which clears the pathway 
without blinding the eyes. 



Let a father, then, as soon as his son is born, con- 
ceive first of all the best possible hopes of him, for 
he will thus grow the more solicitous about his im- 
provement from the very beginning, since it is a com- 
plaint without foundation that "to very few people 
is granted the faculty of comprehending what is im- 
parted to them and that most through dullness of 
understanding lose their labor and their time." For 
on the contrary you will find the greater number of 
men, both ready in conceiving and quick in learning, 
since such quickness is natural to man; and as birds 
are born to fly, horses to run and wild beasts to show 
fierceness, so to us peculiarly belong activity and 
sagacity of understanding, whence the origin of the 
mind is thought to be from heaven. But dull and 
unteachable persons are no more produced in the 
course of nature than are persons marked by mon- 
strosity and deformities ; such are certainly but few. 
It will be proof of this assertion that among boys 
good promise is shown in the far greater number and 
if it passes off in progress of time it is manifest that 
it is not natural ability but care that was wanting. 

— Quintiman on Natural Ability and Training. 



VII 
MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 

The multiplication of power through or- 
ganization has become one of the common- 
place observations of our industrial life. On 
every side we see how enterprises increase not 
only their efficiency but the area of their in- 
fluence and utilize all sorts of collateral and 
allied interests in enlarging their productivity 
and power. So generally is this principle 
now understood and applied industrially that 
there seems to be grave danger that we shall 
become overorganized in some directions and 
sacrifice to it the power of individual initia- 
tive, which is, after all, the most valuable 
thing which civilization has brought to man- 
kind. 

The only domain where this enormous 
power of organization does not appear to be 
recognized is in the region of the individual 
life and mind. Nearly every man organizes 
or tries to organize his work. Comparatively 
few men do or try to organize themselves for 
greater efficiency and power. And yet the 
two processes are very similar, they involve 

141 



142 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

almost exactly the same principles and they 
bring almost the same results when the work 
has been properly done. The difference, 
where there is a difference, arises, of course, 
that in one case you are dealing with mind and 
will and in the other you are dealing simply 
with things, and the latter are, of course, more 
easily handled and directed. But it is not less 
possible to organize selfhood and create a 
compact and thoroughly effective mental or- 
ganization for one's self than it is to so relate 
mere things as to make each supplement and 
help the other. The various capabilities of 
the mind and the various interests of the men- 
tal structure are, in fact, so far as we can 
judge, planned for just such coordination. 
And it would naturally seem to be the first 
business of life, and the earliest as well, to 
make the adjustments in a manner to secure 
the highest and best results. 

With the psychological problem here in- 
volved it is not my purpose now to deal. On 
the practical side, with which this book deals, 
the way and the results to be obtained are so 
plain that no man need err therein. The first 
business in education of any sort should con- 
template just this matter as, in fact, the 
old-fashioned education, though largely uncon- 
sciously, did. When the old-fashioned school- 



MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 143 

masters insisted that the object of education 
was not facts or knowledge but discipline, 
they meant substantially this very thing. 
They saw that isolated facts were not knowl- 
edge, and they perceived very clearly that the 
mastery of certain principles made the discov- 
ery of many kinds of facts easy and sure. 
What they had in mind was simply that dis- 
cipline toughened the mental fiber and made 
men capable of thinking. But, in fact, what 
it really did was so to coordinate the mental 
faculties as to make it easy to turn from one 
thing to another and take with the turn all 
that was available for the new subject. It 
was the ability to apply all previous knowl- 
edge to a new theme and to bring to bear all 
former experience and contact with facts and 
interests upon the fresh question propounded, 
which gave the aspect of a disciplined mind. 
It was, in fact, mental organization. It was 
the power of utilizing everything for every- 
thing else that was thus acquired, whenever it 
was really acquired. 

Take now the simple observation here set 
forth and apply it to any school, a prepara- 
tory or high school for choice, and observe 
what happens. The great mass of boys and 
girls rarely carry the information they secure 
in one department to another. They rarely 



144 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

apply the principles learned in one sphere of 
inquiry to the problems of another. The in- 
formation they have secured seems to be 
packed away like legal documents in separate 
boxes which are taken out and opened and ex- 
amined when that particular thing is men- 
tioned. In fact, we are seeing exactly this 
thing in the highly specialized education of 
to-day, where an expert in one department is 
just a little proud of the fact that he does not 
know anything about anything else, holding 
that this in some mysterious way makes him 
more competent and effective in his own. I 
have heard of performances on the part of 
highly developed specialists, doctors of philos- 
ophy, with regard to the most elementary mat- 
ter outside of their own special line of 
work which should have made them ashamed 
to show themselves in educated companion- 
ship. But they were not ashamed. They 
rather plumed themselves on their ignorance 
of what eveiybody ought to know. 

Now the process of coordinating knowl- 
edge and establishing a mental organization 
is, like all other processes, easiest when the 
mind is most free from hindrances and while 
the powers of acquisition are most keen and 
sensitive, which, of course, means that the 
period of childhood, that is, very young child- 



MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 145 

hood, is the best time to begin this work. 
What has been said about language and lan- 
guage study will apply here with conspicuous 
force because words and forms of words, 
phrases and word stems, can be carried over 
from one department of knowledge to another 
with telling power for welding together the 
facts of one department with those of an- 
other. The same words used in different re- 
lations, in differing senses and with varied 
applications, make one of the best means for 
securing the result desired. In a similar way, 
mathematical definitions can be applied in so 
many ways and to so many things which seem 
to be unrelated to each other that the stimu- 
lus to find relations becomes a habit and when 
the habit of finding other relations than the 
obvious one, or the one directly in view, is 
established the business of mental organiza- 
tion has fairly begun. And when this process 
is begun in a young child, it has an advantage 
which no amount of mere cramming or in- 
dustrious memorizing of isolated facts can 
possibly match. The reason why it so often 
happens that a student can get good marks in 
a given subject and appear from examination 
papers to know considerable about a subject, 
and yet betray in five minutes of conversation 
absolute stupidity and helplessness in the re- 



146 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

gion with which the examination seems to im- 
ply familiar knowledge, arises from precisely 
what has been just stated. Facts have been 
crammed into the mind ready to be pulled out 
for an examiner. But there has been no co- 
ordination of these facts with other facts 
which makes them usable for anything but 
an examination paper. The same thing can 
be shown in many other ways. It is a possible 
explanation why often an honor man proves 
so disappointing a member of society after 
leaving college. 

Mental self-organization, however, is not 
merely the multiplication of knowledge. It 
is the development of selfhood as well. And 
here comes in, perhaps, the most important 
element of the whole problem of child train- 
ing. Such organization is really training in 
the use and application of will-power. The 
intellectual discoveries made through the ap- 
plication of principles learned in one depart- 
ment of knowledge to the problems and de- 
velopment of another, almost irresistibly breed 
a purpose to do this kind of thing constantly 
and make for the growth of the will to study, 
the purpose to know, the habit of inquiry 
or whatever you choose to call it, and, this es- 
tablished, you have again another steel girder 
of the mental organization in place. The will 



MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 147 

to study, the purpose to know, generally flags 
when the mind conceives and originates noth- 
ing on its own account. But give it constant 
exercise in originating, give it a steady dis- 
play of its own power to make fresh and 
original applications of its own skill and 
knowledge, and you stimulate naturally and 
strongly the disposition and the habit of doing 
this thing. 

Anyone who has had anything to do with 
children as students must have observed the 
time come when the child's mind seemed au- 
tomatically to stop. The child stops listen- 
ing, begins to play with something or fidgets 
and wants to be released. Just what has hap- 
pened at that moment? Very probably the 
child has become tired of simply being stuffed 
with things, however excellent in themselves 
or however interesting in themselves, which 
did not relate themselves to anything which 
was already in the child's mind or within the 
sphere of the child's interests. It simply got 
tired of being stuffed with what was sup- 
posed by the teacher or parent to be good 
for it. There was nothing mysterious about 
it. It was just like stopping eating when 
the appetite was fully sated. And since I 
have mentioned eating, may I observe, in 
passing, have we not all noticed how we 



148 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

tempt sick children or sick adults, for 
that matter, to eat? Food is prepared with 
daintiness and attractively served and chosen 
with reference to condition and result. Has 
not many a patient been beguiled into taking 
nutrition from which, presented in the com- 
monplace way, he would have turned with 
loathing or disgust? Everyone knows this 
experience to some extent. Why is not that 
principle sound when dealing with a tender 
mind? In fact, is any other principle sound 
or rational? 

But again, you begin with the things which 
are the matters of supreme interest to a child 
and you have instantaneous attention. You 
show that the play, the last book read, the 
tennis-court, the bicycle, the wheelbarrow, the 
water barrel, to mention only some of those 
which I myself have used, illustrate principles 
of geology or geometry or geography or a 
hundred other things, and every one of these 
things becomes a subject of attention and 
scrutiny for further relations. You thus 
make the interest in knowledge equal the in- 
terest in the play or diversion; in fact, you 
hitch the two together and very often your 
boy will come from the tennis-court with some 
observation about angles about which his mind 
has been subconsciously working while he was 



MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 149 

having his fun. He will come back from 
digging in the sand with remarks about Cae- 
sar's ramparts and ditches, using his Latin 
terms for them, showing that subconsciously 
he has been applying what he learned in his 
last lesson. He will astound you by compar- 
ing some tiny rivulet, in its pathway in the 
garden, with the process of erosion, and there 
you are! That is what I call mental organi- 
zation and when a child begins to do that, he 
begins to organize himself. And what he or- 
ganizes himself is his very own and constitutes 
his reserve stock of mental power, for the 
grasp and attack on new things. 

When this method is intelligently directed 
by a conscientious and observing parent in 
connection with the fertilizing methods of 
which I have spoken and with the careful ex- 
cision of waste matter to which I have also re- 
ferred, you get results that are simply aston- 
ishing and are a joy and delight to the 
parent's heart. There is no satisfaction, cer- 
tainly very few satisfactions in life, so full of 
pleasure and delight as watching this process 
at work. The advance in self-control and 
will power in all directions because governed 
by knowledge and not by caprice is among the 
choicest compensations of all. 

Now, children can be taught a thoroughly 



150 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

scholarly and scientific method of going about 
these things which they need not alter 
throughout life. For example, some years 
ago a group of children trained by this 
method had learned that the "Encyclopaedia 
Britannica" was a storehouse of all kinds of 
interesting information and if you wanted to 
know anything about a given subject, that 
was a good place to seek the information. 
They happened to read an interesting article 
on the subject of chess and chess players. 
They had never seen chessmen nor did they 
know the slightest thing about the game. In- 
terest being aroused, one of them suggested 
finding out more about it. They got down 
the "Britannica" and found the article on 
chess, found it could be played on a checker- 
board which they had, devised impromptu 
chessmen and learned the game from that ar- 
ticle by simply taking one statement after 
another and working it out. They all play 
chess with pleasure and considerable skill and 
not less so because of the rather unique way in 
which the knowledge was acquired. What 
interested me, however, was not that they had 
learned to play chess but that they had learned 
to play a far more important and useful and, 
to me, more exciting game, namely, the pur- 
suit of knowledge. Nor was it strange that 



MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 151 

at a later period when it came to laying out a 
tennis-court they got the proper dimensions 
from the same source. Now the significance 
of all this is not that they got the facts they 
wanted. But they had so organized them- 
selves and their resources and had so familiar- 
ized themselves with at least one tool of 
knowledge that they had made their own a 
scholastic method which is daily employed in 
every scholar's study in the land. It was not 
strange that one of the children who did this, 
afterward, when he had an enforced hour of 
"study" in the high school, spent it getting 
stores of interesting information from the 
cyclopaedias, and that two of these children 
prepared for a certain history examination by 
simply reading the cyclopaedia articles having, 
of course, previously had their minds gener- 
ally familiarized with the broad outlines of the 
subject. 

Of course, at first blush, it seems somewhat 
uncanny and unfitting to see a rather small 
child struggling with a big cyclopaedia. 1 But 

i It occurs to me while reading the proof of this chapter 
that here was one of those happy accidents of life which gave 
it zest and enjoyment. The conjunction of the child and the 
encyclopaedia was the most natural in the world. See the 
derivation of the word encyclopaedia from iyKvuXios, circular 
and -iraideLa, education, bringing up a child (7rats). Who has 
a better right to use an encyclopaedia than the child for 
whom it was named? 



152 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

is it any more uncanny, except for habit and 
association, than to see a small child with a 
big- express wagon or a big tricycle or any 
other object twice as big as itself? The fact 
is, we have accustomed ourselves to imagining 
that the child mind must be kept in the region 
of the trivial, stupid and foolish and have 
oftentimes rigorously excluded all the serious 
things which not only would prove as natural 
as the others to the child but far more interest- 
ing. The latter have a far greater natural re- 
lation to the growing child intellect and the 
capacity and desire for self-expression and 
self-organization which every healthy child 
feels. There is no doubt about this whatever. 
All that it usually wants is opportunity and 
intelligent guidance. The child will usually 
do the rest and supply the natural suggestion 
for the next step in any given direction. 

There has been a good deal said, first and 
last, in pedagogical circles about concentra- 
tion through desire, that is, getting interest 
and attention, through doing what you want 
to do, and there is much to be said for this 
idea. But concentration which is based on 
desire fails when the desire fails. Concentra- 
tion which lasts is based upon a disciplined 
will, and a trained will is acquired, so far as I 
have observed, by one process only, namely, 



MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 153 

the constant facing of matters which have 
both the imperative of interest and necessity 
behind them. With children's minds the im- 
perative of interest is usually great enough of 
itself to secure concentration. And that im- 
perative, sufficiently developed, causes intel- 
lectual cravings which amount to a necessity 
by and by and almost automatically compel 
attention and concentration upon the things 
which are before the mind. There is another 
lure of which I shall speak in the next chapter 
but that comes somewhat later. In general, 
as the self -organization advances you get 
stronger and stronger will power because you 
are getting repeated applications of the will 
to matters of knowledge. The young mind 
finds that there is a possibility for hop, skip 
and jump in the mental world as certainly as 
in the physical world. It finds that there are 
"pace makers" and "record jumps," that there 
are mental "milers" and "100-yard dashes" 
and all the rest of it, if you want to use that 
terminology, and that discovery brings into 
the mental realm precisely the same operative 
motives that apply on the athletic field. Only 
you have joy in distancing some mental com- 
petitor instead of some mere man of legs. 

Concentration through the trained will is 
the secret of all successful self -organization. 



154 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

Most men have no power to organize them- 
selves or, if they have, make no use of it. 
Else why can so very few men manage 
everybody and everything in this land? Why 
is the chasm between your captain of indus- 
try and the mass of men so wide and so deep ? 
Simply because most men are content to let 
somebody else organize their capabilities and 
powers into his particular scheme and when 
his scheme requires their elimination, out they 
go. But a man who is thoroughly self -organ- 
ized cannot be taken thus unawares and cannot 
be thrown out of his relations entirely on any 
man's dictum but his own. Holding firm 
grasp on himself, he keeps a clear eye on all 
his relations and when he discovers that some- 
body else is more potent in his life than he is 
himself, he takes prompt and often drastic 
measures to see to it that he restores himself 
to premiership of his own life. The so-called 
strong man of industry, the so-called man of 
power, with vast control over many things is 
a possibility only in a civilization where most 
people are relatively incapable of minding 
their own affairs or regulating their own lives. 
I know nothing that so develops self-govern- 
ment and self -regulative energy as the proc- 
ess I have above described, namely, of coor- 
dinating all kinds of knowledge so that 



MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 155 

application of that which pertains to one 
thing or one department is smoothly and 
promptly applied in another. In a child it 
can be readily and effectively taught. It is 
the secret of effectiveness in study and self- 
subordination to a particular task. In a cer- 
tain measure it is also the secret of happiness 
in life. 

Mental self -organization brings in its train 
another beneficent result which is of greatest 
importance in study and life, namely, the ma- 
turing judgment. It is impossible for any 
length of time to practice bringing the knowl- 
edge of one department into every other de- 
partment of knowledge without gradually 
coming to compare the relative usefulness and 
availability of what has been gained. Thus 
a truth which is found to be true in half-a- 
dozen different forms of mental effort soon, 
by that fact, acquires a place in the mental 
machinery which is firmer and of greater 
weight than one not so generally capable of 
application. The comparison makes itself 
and when the thing has taken place often 
enough the comparison is made consciously 
and takes the form of conscious judgment on 
the values of the things gained. Children do 
this quite as readily as older people if they 
are given the chance, and while they do not 



156 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

call it "judgment," that is, in fact, what it is, 
and thus the habit of comparison and exact 
observation, with a view to comparison, stead- 
ily grows. Moreover, it develops scrutiny 
on first acquaintance with the ultimate end in 
view and thus you have developing the habits 
of foresight and inference which lead to 
careful and sound reasoning. This is par- 
ticularly true in matters of natural history and 
sciences, and the thousands of simple facts 
about life, which are within the range of com- 
mon experience. They are generally neg- 
lected to be sure, but, organized and built into 
the fixed laws of the mental life, they are a 
conserving and constructive force which is not 
to be despised. 

Now, there remains but one more step after 
these have become habitual and that is to 
make the organization work. And the means 
to this is expression. When a child has done 
anything capably the impulse is to express the 
satisfaction in the achievement, and here all 
the previous training combines to get an ex- 
pression which is cogent, clear and precise and 
so finally you have secured just what all edu- 
cation should bring about, namely, the power 
to observe, to apply, to infer and to express 
the results of all these mental operations. 1 

i The language is President Eliot's. See the epoch-making 



MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 157 

After these have been established even in an 
elementary way you have the basis for per- 
sonal self-government and personal self-ex- 
amination, and whatever comes into the men- 
tal hopper will have to be ground through, 
subjected to these processes. That is how you 
get a trained mind, a full mind and a balanced 
mind. That is how you make a mind that 
finds its springs of action in itself and not in 
others. Thus you build up self -organization 
steadily, surely, and limited only by the amount 
of time and attention bestowed upon it and 
by the capacity and industry of the person 
who directs the work. But there is nothing 
about it that is mysterious or supernatural. 
It is all to be had for simply the consecration, 
to use a religious word, which will devote it- 
self to this duty with the same zeal, the same 
steadiness and self-sacrifice with which other 
tasks are undertaken. Even moderately pur- 
sued, it yields surprising results. Begun early 
enough and persisted in, it becomes a life asset 
to the child, of incomparable value. 

Among the hundreds of letters which I have 
received on this subject there is a general in- 
quiry about the question of dealing with the 
will-power of children when it takes the form 

essay, "Wherein Popular Education has Failed," in his Amer- 
ican Contributions to Civilization. The Century Co., 1897. 



158 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

of obstinacy. When children are "obstinate" 
people generally assume that the child has a 
"strong will." That is, the many letters I 
have seen seem to indicate that this is the gen- 
eral opinion. But, in fact, an obstinate child 
has usually a weak will rather than a strong 
one and the obstinacy is the evidence thereof. 
Obstinacy arises from want of interest and in- 
ability to catch the threads of thought around 
which interest and will-subjection are trained. 
When not due to physical causes, it shows sim- 
ply that greater effort must be made to match 
the natural interests and tendencies of the 
child by more interesting experience and 
greater personal force of mentality by the 
parent. I have seen a very obstinate child 
brought into almost servile obedience by a 
teacher who simply showed in her dealing with 
others a way so much more excellent that the 
weak child longed to be led into the same path 
of enjoyment and pleasure in which those 
around it were obviously proceeding. With 
the dawning of the knowledge of its own in- 
ability to do at will what the others were doing, 
the sense of isolation speedily produced the 
normal desire of being like and with the rest, 
and the end of the problem was in sight. I 
have seen the same plan followed very sue- 



MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 159 

cessfully with older children and sometimes 
even with college students. 

Throughout this discussion the reader will 
not be deceived, of course, by the employment 
of certain terms into imagining that all these 
things are attained at once or in highly de- 
veloped forms. That is not the important 
thing. The important thing is that the 
mind shall be started right and not be 
left creeping when it ought to be walk- 
ing; that it shall not be kept in bondage 
when it ought to be developing freedom; that 
it should not be permitted to indulge itself on 
feeble stuff which makes no draft upon its 
growing and acquisitive powers when it ought 
to be kept trained day by day for severe tasks 
and build up strength which is resident in itself 
rather than dependent upon outside stimu- 
lus and outside nutrition. Mental foraging 
should be encouraged, books of all kinds being 
left for casual examination and for the mo- 
mentary impulse to look at them and some- 
times into them. Materials for inquiry and 
comparison should be furnished in variety and 
abundance and no inquiry left to caprice or 
carelessness and never to indolence. When 
the attention is arrested in any direction, its 
possibilities should be explored. When inter- 



160 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

est develops in any form, its collateral rela- 
tions, especially for mental organization, 
should be examined and the fixed laws of men- 
tal development promptly hitched to that 
interest. The attention and instruction thus be- 
stowed in the few early years of childhood will 
convince anyone who gives them that there is 
almost no subject the elements of which can- 
not be firmly, clearly and rationally fixed in 
the child mind, that it is not necessary to deal 
with trivial things, which pass with the using, 
but that the serious, abiding principles of hu- 
man knowledge may be implanted at a period 
when most people still indulge in baby talk 
with their little ones and hold up their hands in 
horror when someone proposes that it should 
begin to be prepared for the serious work of 
life. 

There is a moral phase of this question of 
self-organization which cannot be omitted 
though I have strenuously tried to avoid 
moralizing throughout these discussions for 
obvious reasons. It is, of course, true that 
the coincident moral growth of the child, with 
the development of all its other powers, adds a 
measure of strength and resource which is 
greater than any other single element. Care- 
ful mental organization is, next to thorough 
religious training, the soundest safeguard 



MENTAL SELF-ORGANIZATION 161 

against moral delinquency that could possibly 
be devised. Moral defects are commonest 
where the ability to foresee consequences is 
least. Once you train a child to look only a 
few steps beyond the immediate relation of 
anj^thing and you have made a great many of 
the moral defects of childhood not impossible 
but very much less insistent, because most of 
these on even the slightest reflection lose their 
attractiveness. I have observed this even in 
very small children, so small, in fact, that I 
would not without this observation have be- 
lieved that such effective and deterrent moral 
reflection was possible. But so it is. Parents 
often complain of the bad influences upon 
their own children of other children, which is 
simply admitting that some other child, not in- 
frequently one of inferior opportunities and 
breeding but higher self -organization, often 
induced by necessity and hardship, is leading 
and governing their own. The building-up of 
the ability for coordination and the habit of 
reflection which is incident to it and the percep- 
tion of relations which grow out of any given 
act or programme, will provide a rampart 
against many moral wrongs, which is not easily 
scaled. This is a subject by itself which can- 
not be treated here, but it may fairly be claimed 
that as a moral protective agency, to inculcate 



162 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

self -organization and the observation of ef- 
fects, relations and consequences, is one of the 
best instruments in the rearing of young 
people. Here again leadership is power and 
the ability to discriminate, in even the most 
rudimentary way, operates in the choice of 
companionships, the estimate of influences, 
jealousy for one's own selfhood, all of which 
are safeguards for upright character. 

The multiplication of power which comes 
through effective self -organization diminishes 
by just so much the number of individuals who 
have any chance for entrance into the citadel 
of personality. Into a trained mind the num- 
ber of persons who have access is fewer and 
they are of higher quality and ability, other 
things being equal, than those who have free 
access into an untrained and unorganized 
mind. The same is true of the entire person- 
ality, which, organized on an all-round basis 
of insight, knowledge, observation and 
thought for ends more remote than those which 
appear on the surface, has a wall of protection 
which is moral insurance of the highest type. 



But do you, parents, impose severe exactions on 
him that is to teach your boys : that he be perfect in 
the rules of grammar for each word — read all histo- 
ries — know all authors as well as his own finger ends ; 
that if questioned at hazard, while on his way to the 
thermae or the baths of Phoebus, he should be able to 
tell the name of Anchises' nurse and the name and 
native land of the stepmother of Anchemolus, tell off- 
hand how many years Acestes lived, how many 
flagons of wine the Sicilian king gave to the Phryg- 
ians. Require of him that he mold their youthful 
morals as one models a face in wax. Require of him 
that he be the reverend father of the company and 
check every approach to immorality. 
"This," says the father, "be the object of your care; 
and when the year comes round again, receive for 
your pay as much gold as the people demand for the 
victorious charioteer." 

— Juvenal, Satire on the Estimate of the 
Teacher. 



VIII 
BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 

One of the standing sources of distress to 
the college faculties of this country at the 
present moment is the immense chasm between 
the interest which the students manifest in 
athletics and that which they show in scholarly 
achievement. A freshman class which will 
easily raise a thousand dollars for its football 
team will let its debaters travel to a rival col- 
lege town at their own expense and even when 
the debate is held in its own borders, attend it 
in very small numbers. Many thousands of 
college alumni will go long distances to see the 
annual football game between their colleges 
and their favorite rivals, who will not take the 
trouble to appear at Commencement time and 
who know absolutely nothing concerning the 
great educational interests of the college. 
People who are in hot haste to condemn the 
colleges should first examine the practices of 
the alumni. Those who are quick to visit 
wrath upon the college authorities for seeming 
to yield so much to the athletic tendencies and 
demands of the student body, should above all 

165 



166 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

things find out first what moves the vast body 
of parents in sending their sons to college. 
Even the most casual inquiry along this line 
will reveal the fact that most of the alumni 
have no scholarly tastes, no intellectual ambi- 
tions, properly to be described as such, and it 
should not be very strange that their children 
are lacking in the same direction. Indeed, it 
is a fair question to-day whether the majority 
of the vast and steadily increasing student 
body have strictly intellectual or educational 
purposes in entering college. Certainly the 
major activities of the student body and the 
distribution of their time, energy and force 
does not seem to indicate this to be the case. 

And yet there was a time when all these 
young people were as susceptible to the appeal 
of the mind and the heroism of intellectual 
achievement as they later became to the 
glories of the athletic field. There was a time 
when all these interests were contending for 
the premier place in the youthful mind. The 
desire to excel, the willingness to be prominent, 
to be differentiated from the mass of other 
children and young people, is very strong in 
the youthful mind. What finally assumes the 
first place comes to that dignity by a per- 
fectly natural route. No boy loves baseball 
better than football except for reasons which 



BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 167 

can readily be traced. No boy comes to col- 
lege with a highly developed yearning to be a 
tennis champion or a champion shot-putter or 
a speedy quarter-miler without having had 
certain well-defined influences operate upon 
him to bring about this result. Where the 
child develops interest, the agencies which make 
for that interest have been at work and have 
allied themselves with the child's disposition to 
know and shine for something distinctive to 
itself. Ask any boy what he plans to be in 
after life, and as a rule, unless he has had his 
career clearly outlined for him by circum- 
stances which dictate his future in an absolute 
way, he will respond in the line of his intensest 
interests, entirely oblivious of the absurdity 
or grotesqueness of his choice. Thus the son 
of a great brewing magnate a few years ago 
electrified his father, a worthy German who 
had pursued his profession of brewer with an 
eye single to making a good product, after the 
German fashion, and who thought only of see- 
ing his son succeed him in his great enterprise, 
by announcing that he intended to become an 
evangelist! Inquiry developed the fact that 
he had had as a teacher a man who was a great 
admirer of D wight L. Moody. He had so 
portrayed that man and his moral and spiritual 
influence over men to the brewer's son that he 



168 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

had captivated his imagination and aroused 
his ambition to such a degree that the youth 
thought nothing so great, nothing so admira- 
ble and nothing so worthy of attainment as 
such a place in the esteem of men as he imag- 
ined D. L. Moody to hold. It caused a family 
difficulty of great proportions and was years 
in getting settled and, when it was, the brew- 
er's son did not succeed to his father's business. 
The great brewer, and he was a man of splen- 
did qualities and character as well, had per- 
mitted another ambition to be bred in his son 
than the one he hoped would develop naturally 
and found too late that the soil was occupied 
by another growth. His case does not differ 
except in the antithesis from that of thousands 
of American fathers. 

In analyzing the case just named, the potent 
factor should not be overlooked and that was 
a teacher who had himself so assimilated the 
meaning of a great career that he was able to 
awaken the longing to reproduce that career 
in a boy whose natural surroundings forbade 
such an ideal in the ordinary course of things 
from even getting a hearing. Yet it was the 
triumphant one in the boy's mind. Another 
fact to be kept in mind is that the ideal was one 
worthy, admirable and spiritually and intellec- 
tually attractive in itself. It is rather unfor- 



BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 169 

tunate that the scholarly personality has not 
always been attractive either in the character 
of its performances or in the presentation of 
itself to the youthful mind. The highest 
scholarship, both as to outstanding character- 
istics arid the personalities which represent it, 
has not been and is not now specially attrac- 
tive to youth. This can be amply proven by 
examining the current caricatures of the 
scholar as a person who is full of abstractions, 
unpractical and generally not to be compan- 
ioned. Whatever the public may think of the 
usefulness of the teacher, the solid and unan- 
swerable fact is that the real estimate is found 
in his classification in the community, which is 
that of a higher menial. It is entirely within 
the facts to say that the mass of the people in 
any given city feel no interest, no gratitude, no 
particular respect for the teaching force of 
that city and know it chiefly through the 
medium of complaints or trouble of some kind 
in connection with the education of their chil- 
dren. This fully explains why a street laborer 
with a hoe, scraping mud in the streets, is often 
paid a larger wage than the teacher who is 
molding the minds of young children. 
Money, of course, is not the standard of 
finality in this world but compensation follows 
pretty closely the public estimate of the serv- 



170 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

ices bestowed. But that, of course, is another 
question. 

What I am trying to make clear is that, as 
the case stands at the present time, if you get 
intellectual ambition for any child you get it 
at the cannon's mouth. You get it in spite of 
parental negligence, in spite of communal in- 
difference, in spite of the utter neglect of 
every rational means by which intellectual in- 
terest and ambition are stirred into action. 
And yet the mind of a child is as ready to re- 
ceive impulses along this line as any other. 
It is ready to contemplate an intellectual hero, 
when one is presented to its attention, as any 
other. It stands as ready to follow in the 
pathway of emulation after a strictly intellec- 
tual ideal as any other. Indeed, it is often 
found to be so to such a degree that though 
neglected at home, in the school and in the 
community at large, it survives. Sometimes 
it is created by some far-seeing and enthusias- 
tic teacher, but generally intellectual ambition, 
when it comes at all, comes out of a home where 
such ambitions are cherished and where the 
triumphs of the mind are rated above the vic- 
tories of the body and where the scholar is not 
crouching at the feet of the football hero, 
praying for a few fragments of time for his 
branch of knowledge, but the real leader and 



BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 171 

guide of humanity without whom knowledge 
and civilization alike must perish. I can well 
recall as a child visiting the home of one of 
my playmates and being introduced to a gen- 
tleman who seemed to be doing all the talk- 
ing while the family listened with reverence 
and rapt attention to what he was saying, and, 
asking afterward who he was, was told, "He 
is a scholar!" with an air of finality that as- 
sumed that I ought to know that a "scholar" 
was a person of such distinction that everybody 
ought to keep silent and listen. It is not 
strange that every one of that family of boys, 
five in number, who that evening listened to 
their visitor, impressed with the reverence 
which was felt by their parents for a scholar, 
themselves became scholars and form a re- 
markable group of men in the community 
where they live. Though engaged in widely 
differing pursuits they are scholars all of 
them and they would have been "scholarly" 
persons no matter what pursuit they gave 
themselves to. This was purely a case of 
cause and effect and it can be repeated in any 
home when the proper means are taken. 

It is an interesting fact also that intellectual 
ambition has the first opportunity with the 
child and the loss of it is, therefore, even more 
reprehensible in those who suffer it to be lost. 



172 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

A young child cannot take a very large part 
in affairs until its physical abilities are very 
considerably developed. It has its games and 
play, to be sure, but these are within a very 
limited area. Its mental life, on the other 
hand, may be world-wide almost from the 
start through the processes which I have al- 
ready described. Its interests intellectual may 
be diversified, entertaining, alluring and ex- 
citing in a thousand directions before the little 
feet are able to kick a football or it has the 
command over its arms required to catch a 
thrown ball or over its legs to run a base suc- 
cessfully. The mind works a thousand times 
as fast as the physical structure. You can 
see this any time by asking a child to write 
what he has told you so brightly and interest- 
ingly in an oral discussion. You will see at 
once that his hands are undeveloped, the mus- 
cles of his arms stiff and unpliable, and hin- 
drances at every turn fret and prevent him 
from moving in quick response to his mental 
activity. That is simply because the mind 
moves much more rapidly than the body possi- 
bly can. Thus it comes about that ambitions 
of an intellectual kind, which have their origin 
in vivid mental images, picturing the vast in- 
fluence of the mind, or in powers which are 
the evidence of great mental force, or social 



BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 173 

and spiritual revolutions which are the im- 
mediate outworking of the powerful thought, 
really have the right of way in the child mind. 
The only reason why that primacy is not main- 
tained, is because it is neglected. By regular 
stages the physical life is permitted to be- 
come the ideal of life. The book gives way to 
the sword or the gun or the football or some- 
thing else. The games follow largely along 
similar lines and by the time the boy or the 
girl comes to the place where the blossoming 
mind should begin to realize some of the 
things which it has been contemplating with 
longing, it has become deflected from the in- 
tellectual to the physical ideal, if it happens to 
be a boy, or the social idea, if it happens to be 
a girl, and the ambition to excel intellectually 
remains only as a desirable asset which may 
possibly be secured but only through a process 
which is necessarily long and very unpleasant. 
In this of course the false use made of some 
of the noblest emotions materially aid. Pa- 
triotism means to fight for your country. 
Hence the idealization of the soldier, the sailor, 
the battle-ship and the man behind the gun. 
The triumphs of science, of art, of culture, 
of statesmanship are neglected, partly from 
want of appreciation and partly from inca- 
pacity to present them, and the ambitions of 



174 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

the child sink into lower and more material 
channels. 

While all this is going on, there is probably 
no passion of the American people about 
which they feel themselves so sincere as the 
passion for education. But if it is really as 
sincere as it seems to be, and there are grave 
doubts on this point, it is woefully misdirected 
and helpless. Personally I do not believe a 
man when he tells me that he wants above all 
things a thorough education for his child and 
then does not make the slightest effort from 
one year's end to another to acquaint himself 
with the means and the persons and the insti- 
tutions, public and private, which are giving 
or failing to give his child the education so 
highly extolled. It may not be hypocrisy, but 
it looks suspiciously like it. I have absolutely 
no confidence in the utterances of such a person 
on this subject. My observation is that people 
do what they want to do. They go after the 
things they want most and first. And if a 
father wanted thorough and effective educa- 
tion for his child "above and beyond all other 
things," he would do something more about it 
than simply issue eulogies on the subject of 
education and all the while neglect his child. 
But even allowing that it is all sincere, it in- 
dicates a curious want of knowledge and com- 



BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 175 

mon sense to imagine that a high and intense 
longing for knowledge and the things of the 
mind will grow without cultivation, or that it 
will survive luxury, coddling, idleness and in- 
dulgences of every kind. Yet this is what we 
see on all sides. The wrongs done to young 
children by the neglect of their intellectual am- 
bitions and aims by their parents is one of the 
wickedest things about the American home. 
It is losing to the American people taste, cul- 
ture, civilization and social advances of incal- 
culable worth. But above and beyond all this, 
it is losing for a large fraction of the human 
race happiness and delight beyond computa- 
tion. 

Ambition follows interest and interest is 
bred by the study of models. If the models 
presented for the inspection and commended 
to the attention of the young child, are dis- 
tinctly of an intellectual quality, admiration 
for the intellectual qualities comes by a per- 
fectly natural method. If to this is added 
conscious progress in the direction in which the 
model leads as ideal, the ambition grows by 
leaps and bounds. It has always seemed odd 
to me that parents did not utilize their own ad- 
mirations for the benefit of their children. 
By this I mean that their favorite figures in 
history and life are rarely held up and their 



176 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

children taught to look upon them and under- 
stand just why they are worthy of admira- 
tion. But whenever this is done, there is never 
any douht as to the result. Why is Schiller 
the best loved poet of the Germans? Because 
you will find him quoted and his verses re- 
peated in the thousands of German households 
where the children hear about him and are 
familiar with his work long before they have 
any literary sense or any ability to make any 
distinct choices of a literary character. Who 
made Burns the national poet of Scotland? 
The homes of Scotland, of course. That is 
how national poets are made. I well remem- 
ber a time when multitudes of children were 
believed to be unable to learn how to sing. 
But as soon as they began to hear songs and 
were urged to believe that they could sing, 
they broke into singing. I know any number 
of children whose parents believed them to be 
incapable of strenuous intellectual work till 
somebody woke them up and showed them 
conspicuous examples of victorious struggle 
and made them admire the model enough to 
make the effort to go and do likewise. Hu- 
man beings insensibly grow to be like what 
they are taught to admire and if the admirable 
qualities of the intellectual life are made clear 
to the young child, they will love knowledge 



BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 177 

as much as they love anything else. It is but 
simple truth to say that we have not expected 
little children to take any interest in the great 
heroes of the intellectual life and consequently 
they have been given over to the heroes of 
lesser accomplishments. 

When we speak of an ambitious child, we 
usually mean a child that has found a specific 
direction in which it wishes to go. And that 
will ordinarily be found to be a child that by 
some process, natural or unnatural, has had its 
attention kept fixed upon something which it 
has been led to admire. Why should the ad- 
mirations of a child be left to accident, or 
caprice? Why should we not select the things 
which we wish the youth to love and point 
out with exactness and care what is desir- 
able, what is beautiful and of good report, 
in connection with them? And why should 
not such a process be the result of a dis- 
tinct plan and kept distinctly outlined as a 
part of the child's development? I have in- 
terviewed many successful men in many call- 
ings of life and have uniformly found that 
they were inspired to make the efforts which 
made them successful men by some personal- 
ity, sometimes a living model, sometimes an 
historical character which had so arrested their 
attention that they felt an irresistible desire to 



178 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

follow in his footsteps. I have lately heard 
of a youth who has for a dozen years been an 
incendiary with a passion for setting fires. It 
is now known that his father was a firebug 
before him and added to this vicious tendency 
a lovable personality which so impressed his 
young son that he glorified the criminal habits 
of his father and made them the ambition of 
his life. All of which suggests a phase of 
this subject which should cause deep reflection 
on the part of parents. The love of parents, 
strong in most households up to a certain 
point, makes the father and the mother the 
working models of manhood and womanhood. 
In this matter example is much more power- 
ful than precept. I had an illustration of this 
not long ago. I was interviewing a boy of 
thirteen whose school work was not successful 
and, while searching for the causes and trying 
to find out at what point to attack his disin- 
clination to work, naturally tried to appeal to 
him on the score of his affection for his par- 
ents. While I could not draw from this boy 
any expression of disloyalty concerning his 
father, it was perfectly evident that he re- 
garded my effort to show that he could gratify 
his father in no better way than to make a 
fine record at school, with amused contempt. 
Indirectly I discovered that all he knew of his 



BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 179 

father's academic career was the part which 
was not exactly inspiring and not at all calcu- 
lated to make his son feel that he regarded 
scholarship as of any particular importance. 
Now this gentleman had a really good record. 
He had within his grasp probably the most 
successful tool possible for inspiring his boy, 
namely, the natural expectation that his son 
should follow in his footsteps. But he never 
dreamed, till I called his attention to the fact, 
that the creditable stories of his academic ca- 
reer could be told without boasting or that 
anything might be interesting to his son but 
his escapades! At all events, that is all the 
youth heard about with any show of enthu- 
siasm or interest on the part of his father. 
But I know another man whose boy, a lad of 
six playing with his Phi Beta Kappa key, one 
day heard the story of his father's struggle for 
that coveted badge of scholastic honor. "Then 
I must get one, too," said the six-year-old. 
And he did. That is what I call breeding 
ambition. That young boy went to college 
with a distinct vision of scholastic achievement 
in his mind. He had through college a visible 
symbol before him of industry, energy and 
fidelity to the interests of the mind. He made 
numberless sacrifices of pleasure to attain it. 
Who will deny that the brief time taken to tell 



180 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

that story and to explain the meaning of the 
little golden key did not bring forth abundant 
fruit? But how many Phi Beta Kappa men 
who have young children think about this pow- 
erful resource for the breeding of intellectual 
ambition in their children? Certainly not a 
college professor, friend of mine, whose chil- 
dren are constantly in trouble with their 
school work, which bothers children and par- 
ents alike, though the father is an academic 
star of first magnitude! Why do certain 
families send representative after representa-* 
tive to the great football teams of the great 
colleges? Because the one subject which the 
younger boys hear from their elders is football 
and they plan to be football stars as much as 
they plan to be men. And given the requisite 
physical equipment they usually are. If you 
do the same thing with scholarship you will get 
scholars. But you cannot talk football and 
get scholarship. You cannot talk money for- 
ever and get idealists. You cannot talk stocks 
or any other kind of business continually and 
get young people who will think about the 
pleasures and satisfactions of learning. 
Children, like all the rest of the world, thrive 
by what they feed upon. Ambition is not a 
heaven-sent quality given to some people and 
withheld from others. It is a seedling in every 



BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 181 

child's soul. Nurtured, trained and fertilized 
you can get just what you want to get. You 
cannot of course make a silk purse out of a 
sow's ear. But you can cause the young mind 
to grapple with what it makes its supreme in- 
terest, and, in the vast majority of cases, 
master it and bring forth fruit, some thirty, 
some sixty and some an hundred fold. 

Emerson says, "Each man is a hero and an 
oracle to somebody; and to that person what- 
ever he says has an enhanced value." This 
truth, true of all persons, is trebly true of 
children in the home. If the father chooses to 
be a hero to his sons, he may be one and re- 
main one to the end of his days. If the mother 
chooses to be a heroine to her daughters, she 
has the first and the best chance with her own 
children. If father and mother let that dis- 
tinction go to somebody else, it is their own 
deliberate choice. That should be understood 
by every parent in the land. And if it is 
thoroughly understood it will be seen that not 
only is great power transferred by this enor- 
mous influence but likewise enormous respon- 
sibility shirked. It must be true from what 
we see before us everywhere that parents 
either do not think about this matter or de- 
liberately abdicate from the throne of influence 
with their children. We often speak of what 



182 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

is bred in the bone. But what is bred in the 
bone is comparatively unimportant beside what 
is bred in the thought, experience and idealiz- 
ing* tendencies of children at an early age. I 
know a little girl whose older brother and 
sister very early developed special tastes and 
tendencies which they frequently expressed. 
"And what are you going to be, little girl?" 
she was asked. "Oh, I am going to be just a 
mother," said the child. It is superfluous to 
remark that this child has one of the most re- 
markable mothers in the community where she 
lives. She has idealized motherhood and her 
children need no Madonnas of legend or poe- 
try or art to give them sweet, enduring and 
inspiring visions of what beautiful motherhood 
is and ought to be. Her children will call her 
blessed to the end of days. And it is safe to 
say that they will carry into life as among the 
strongest influences of their careers that lovely 
model of perfect motherhood! 

Breeding ambition has another important 
function which must be noted in dealing with 
this subject. The moment you have roused 
ambition in a child you have created a fresh 
source of power within the child's mind and 
at the same time located there the responsibil- 
ity, in so far as it relates to effort, instead of 



BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 183 

in authority exercised from without. Once 
ambition is aroused the process of auto-educa- 
tion begins — self-examination, self -discipline 
and self -direction — crudely enough at first but 
nevertheless clearly apprehended and acknowl- 
edged. This leads to independent efforts 
which are more valuable in their mental result 
than all formal education. Spencer refers to 
this in his essay on Education when he says: 
"Any piece of knowledge which the pupil has 
himself acquired, any problem which he has 
himself solved, becomes by virtue of the con- 
quest much more thoroughly his than it could 
else be. The preliminary activity of mind 
which his success implies, the concentration of 
thought necessary to it and the excitement con- 
sequent on his triumph conspire to register all 
the facts in his memory in a way that no mere 
information heard from a teacher or read in a 
schoolbook can be registered. Even if he 
fails, the tension to which his faculties have 
been wound up insures his remembrance of the 
solution, when given to him, better than half- 
a-dozen repetitions would." It is clear enough 
here that the important thing is to inspire that 
effort, to cause the child to want to do some- 
thing worth while so much that it will get the 
"mental tension" and the "activity of mind" 



184 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

incidental to the satisfaction which it craves. 
Notice, too, that failure in this direction and 
under these conditions is not failure at all. 
The increment gained from a solid effort pre- 
cludes serious distress because the exercise of 
the faculties has so greatly increased the con- 
sciousness of power. 

The habit of aiming at a great result, of 
looking to an ultimate instead of an immediate 
goal of effort, tends to enlarge the mental 
powers and expand the mental horizon in 
children as it does in adults. Once get young 
persons in the way of looking for some- 
thing that is palpably great and as palpably 
beyond their easy reach and you get the same 
kind of action in the mind that you see in the 
arms of a small child reaching for an object 
upon a shelf just beyond its reach. The ob- 
jective point may not be reached. But the 
effort has strengthened the mental fiber, it has 
felt its possibilities, it has tried itself for an 
end ; demanding the best that is in it, and this 
habitually done, will breed personal deter- 
mination and perseverance which are simply 
ambition at work. It is not material just how 
the effort works out. But as a matter of fact, 
nine times out of ten the child succeeds and 
immediately tries for something still higher. 
But to inspire this effort, the memory must be 



BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 185 

stored with high thoughts and splendid deeds 
which call for intellectual activity, and the 
vision must be kept fixed upon the great per- 
sonalities who have enriched the thought of 
the world. 



The playing of games may have, indeed, ought to 
have, the excellent results which Bowen claimed for 
it, and yet it may be doubted whether the experience 
of life shows that boys so brought up do in fact 
turn out substantially more good-humored, unselfish 
and fit for the commerce of the world than others 
who have lacked this training. And the further 
question remains whether the games are worth their 
costly candle. That they occupy a good deal of 
time at school and at college is not necessarily an 
evil, seeing that the time left for lessons or study is 
sufficient if well spent. The real drawback incident 
to the excessive devotion that games inspire in our 
days is that they leave little room in the boy's or the 
collegian's mind either for interest in his studies or 
for the love of nature. They fill his thoughts, they 
divert his ambition into channels of no permanent 
value to his mind or life, they continue to absorb his 
interest and form a large part of his reading long 
after he has left school or college. 

— James Bryce, Sketch of Edward Bowen of 
Harrow. 



IX 

THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 

Perhaps the general impression upon many 
readers of what has been previously written, 
will be a f eeling that, after all, desirable as all 
these things may be and profitable for the 
child's future and its advancement in life and 
usefulness, the price which it demands is too 
great to be paid. Most people mature in life, 
conscious only of the burdens of life, often of 
the struggle for mere existence, and not in- 
frequently disillusioned by their own experi- 
ences, will reason that the young people will 
meet the severe struggle of life soon enough 
and that they should not be denied the pleas- 
ures of childhood, so called, and should be 
kept care and fancy free as long as possible. 
Many parents have said substantially that to 
the present writer. Such opinions assume 
that worth-while activities of the child mind 
are necessarily devoid of pleasure and that 
somehow the consideration in childhood of what 
afterward constitute the serious studies of 
life, despoils children of pleasure, vitiates the 
natural freedom and artlessness of children 

187 



188 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

and prematurely induces solemnity of mind 
and sedateness of behavior. Let me assure 
every person who holds this view that there is 
no more mistaken assumption possible than this. 
I have at this moment come in from the 
meadow adjoining my summer home where I 
have officiated as "catcher" in a "battery" 
where a very young person, just past his tenth 
year, officiated as "pitcher." For an hour I 
sweated, ran and dodged and jumped around 
trying to perform the duties of this onerous 
position to the satisfaction of the young twirler 
who is planning to make a baseball record 
along with the rest of his ambitions. Previ- 
ous to the baseball episode he had been put 
through for an hour what the persons to whom 
I have referred above, would probably style 
a grilling lesson in verbal analysis, and im- 
mediately succeeding the play another lesson 
equally grilling in Latin was taken up. It 
can be said with absolute truthfulness that the 
delight in the first and third periods was not 
only not less but if anything more than that 
in the baseball achievements, which was, all 
things considered, not despicable. The de- 
light of a "straight throw" in Latin composi- 
tion was not less than that in a ball sent ac- 
curately over the plate. The pleasure of 
prompt and fruitful recognition of numerous 



THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 189 

verbal relations between various word stems 
did not seem to be one whit less than that 
which resulted from a happy "catch." In 
fact, I observed that the same expressions of 
delight and the same symptoms of pleasure ap- 
peared in both cases, and the spontaneous move- 
ments in both instances were so similar, so 
alike, both in the sources from which they 
sprang as well as in their manifestations, that 
the conclusion was irresistible that one thing 
gave as much pleasure as the other. 

The same thing has appeared to me many 
times, and this was simply a momentary test 
made for the purpose of a careful and minute 
study of results in a given case. The fact is, 
pleasure in mental achievement especially 
when due to conscious and sustained effort, is 
quite as great and quite as satisfactory as any 
other; if anything, more so. Mental activity 
and mental effort, as sources of pleasure, have 
rarely been adequately considered by teachers 
generally, and the pleasure motive to study is. 
almost absolutely ignored by both parents and 
teachers. Many teachers do at times observe 
the pleasure of children when they have done 
any work satisfactorily, but, for some reason 
or other, probably the assumption to which I 
have referred, avoid making use of the pleas- 
ure motive in inducing special advance in 



190 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

this direction. But I cannot see why a child 
should not be taught and guided to seek pleas- 
ure in one kind of exercise as well as in an- 
other. Here again the child generally knows 
how to play one thing and does not know how 
to play the other. It is a question often of 
which game it knows best and if the games of 
the mind (and these games continue through- 
out life, and one of the conspicuous joys of a 
scholarly life is the delight and satisfaction of 
discovery, whether original or otherwise) were 
as steadily taught and as carefully outlined in 
one instance as in the other, you would get sub- 
stantially the same results. How many times 
a little girl making the first doll clothes comes 
to the mother or nurse for instruction! And 
it is usually given because here various kinds 
of motives combine in the parent's mind to 
give the needed lesson carefully and often 
with extraordinary care. Expert needle- 
women can remember such instruction often 
given and illustrated over and over again. It 
soon comes to be a pleasurable exercise to do 
these things because the little girl knows how. 
The same thing is true of the boys who want 
to be taught how to "pitch" and "catch" and 
how to "curve" balls and what not, things that 
relate to the athletic field. But how many 
people ever give the child an exhibition of the 



THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 191 

pleasures which they themselves have in some 
distinctive mental achievement! How often 
is a fine paragraph in a book or a specially 
beautiful passage in a classic poem read and 
its excellencies shown to the child, its imagery 
praised, its force and power extolled and the 
desire for emulation aroused? The assump- 
tion that this has not interest for the child is 
wholly gratuitous. What can be done and is 
done can be seen in the celerity with which some 
smart speech, usually an impertinence, I may 
add, is repeated which raises a general laugh 
at the table or in a company of adults, when 
the child is made to feel that it has gained 
general approval or applause which is mis- 
taken for approval. What is thus secured on 
an utterly false basis is possible on a sound 
basis as well and will not only give pleasure, 
but, I believe, greater pleasure than mere 
athletic skill because it is seen to involve higher 
and better powers. The reason why many a 
young boy wants to be a baseball player above 
all things is that he hears everybody give praise 
to a successful pitcher or batter and comes to 
think these are the great achievements of men. 
The same motive operates among college 
students to so great an extent that scholarship 
by general consent has lost its eminence in 
American educational institutions. But let 



192 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

the emphasis be changed so that a crack scholar 
is pointed out instead of a crack football player 
and you will instantly find a change of feel- 
ing among the young students whose future as 
such is still before them. One of the greatest 
motives to activity in any direction is the 
pleasure incident to the approval of those whom 
we esteem most and love best. With young 
children that means father and mother. Let 
father and mother place the emphasis where 
it belongs and half the battle is won. 

It is a common saying that things display 
the qualities of their source. Get it once into 
the youthful mind that mental effort and men- 
tal achievement are the great glory of human 
beings and bring into the foreground of its 
consciousness not the gladiators of history but 
its statesmen, its thinkers, its scientists, its phi- 
lanthropists, and you have furnished, first of 
all, a means of comparing results which almost 
any child will comprehend very quickly. His- 
tory is full of examples and the instinct of 
hero-worship tends to reenforce the example. 
But if all your heroes are warriors, your child 
will want to play with drums, guns and 
swords. If the major part of its notion of 
great men and great works is connected with 
destruction, you will very likely stimulate 
every instinct of destruction and provoke ex- 



THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 193 

periments in this art at a very early stage. 
But if your heroes are in another realm and 
the heroes of science, many of them yet to be 
discovered so far as literature is concerned, or 
the heroes of humanity, you create mind stuff 
that rebels without eif ort against destruction 
and starts out with entirely opposite notions of 
activity and self-expenditure. And started on 
such a course, pleasure in its fulfillment fol- 
lows naturally and inevitably whenever any- 
thing in this direction is achieved. This can 
be inculcated very early in life by the habit 
and praise of smooth and careful articulation, 
accuracy in speech and any distinctive achieve- 
ment which has a mental origin or character. 
The child will very soon feel what its elders 
value most and will seek to meet the demand 
by furnishing the supply. 

The pleasure which the child experiences 
and of which it gives the most instant signs, 
is more than exceeded by that of the parent or 
teacher who thinks along this line. I know 
nothing so fine and so thoroughly satisfying 
as to see the mind of any human being work- 
ing soundly and smoothly and with apparent 
self -regulative power. And to see this proc- 
ess in its early stages, growing in a child's 
mind, is a very delightful sensation. You get 
the happy consciousness that your own mental 



194 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

processes are sound because your errors will 
be repeatedly thrown back at you in large let- 
ters like the big hand of a child's penmanship. 
You will have a constant corrective for your- 
self and you will unconsciously be kept on 
edge, so to speak, to make your own power 
more accurate, your own insight more acute 
and your own habits more careful. And in- 
stead of being irksome, the first time you see 
your own effort eventuating in a fine effort 
on the part of the child, only improved with 
the child's simplicity, naturalness and artless- 
ness, taking on naturally what you have labor- 
iously acquired by heavy self -subordination 
and self-restraint, you will feel that you have 
made a genuine contribution to the fulness 
of the life of mankind. In fact, you have 
made such a contribution because his genera- 
tion will do almost by nature what you have 
had to acquire by effort, and a real and per- 
manent advance in the standard of humanity 
has been made. And as one capacity after 
another develops and they begin to cooperate 
and you see growing up about you, healthy, 
sane, self-controlling and self -directing indi- 
viduals, who are mentally strong as they are 
morally sound, you feel that the hero who has 
simply killed so many thousand people is a 
mere slaughterer and not worthy to be men- 



THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 195 

tioned by the side of one father or mother 
who advances by ever so small a degree the 
type of humanity by which this world is to be 
inhabited. It looks like extracting a very 
great and portentously big satisfaction from 
one insignificant little baby! But it is there 
for every parent who will take the trouble to 
find it. Moreover, it furnishes a touchstone 
for testing most of the things for which 
people spend life and substance, which is very 
comforting. The vain competitions of life 
and the silly inanities for which many people 
pour out their strength and labor are by this 
work shown in their true relation and their true 
valuation, and the estimate is wholly gratify- 
ing. What shall it profit a man if he be a 
captain of industry and his son a debauchee or 
a hairbrained idiot known only in dance halls 
and chorus-girl shows? What shall it profit 
a woman if she be a leader in every club in 
town, the first figure at every social splurge 
and her gowns reported in every Sunday news- 
paper if her daughter is a silly person from 
whom no serious opinion can be extracted by 
anybody? What indeed shall it profit if you 
are everything in this world and your suc- 
cessors are distinctly less creditable as human 
beings than your own generation or that which 
preceded it? The knowledge that you have 



196 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

improved your own family, your own genera- 
tion and your own contribution to the race, is 
the highest satisfaction in this world, with only 
the one exception — the knowledge of an hon- 
orable, unstained life. 

The pleasures of the mind last longer than 
any others. Bodily pleasure at best has its 
necessary limits. The shouting and the tu- 
mult of physical satisfaction even of the best 
sort dies and disappears. But the genuine 
pleasures of the mind last forever. They 
have a staying quality which enriches advanc- 
ing years and forms the natural linkage with 
the growth of the world. Everyone must 
have noticed the differences between that kind 
of people who at any age seem to be in touch 
with what is going on and who read with de- 
light and avidity the newest things that are 
taking place everywhere in the world and 
others not so constituted. I have in mind 
such a man, an octogenarian now, who is the 
youngest person I know. His childhood was 
such a childhood as I have described in the 
foregoing pages, nurtured, fertilized, trained 
and enriched at every turn, and his old age, 
which term, by the way, applied to him seems 
foolishness, finds him one of the most active 
men of the community, keen in intellect, 
stored in learning and a perennial source of 



THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 197 

pleasure to all his friends by the sumptuous- 
ness of his remembrance of personal and his- 
torical lore. Mental pleasures last. And if 
it is true that advancing years tend to revert 
to the earliest impressions of life, then why 
not make the "second" childhood a noble, full 
and worthy one in which the mind shall turn 
back to great things, high thoughts and com- 
panionship with the princes of the earth in 
thought, imagination and knowledge? Could 
anything be more reasonable or desirable? 
There is an exquisite pleasure in all this which 
cannot be expressed in words but which only 
the initiated know. 

The durable pleasures are those, generally 
speaking, which are founded upon some fixed 
expansion of the personality, either by way of 
qualities of mind or alliance with some of the 
permanent forces of life. Knowledge is the 
one thing which never fails to present attrac- 
tion and allurement to those who have once 
become acquainted with her varied stores. 
Nor does this mean that a man need to be a 
person of vast learning. It means, simply, 
that he shall have peeped behind the curtain 
and seen what there is to learn and how many 
people there are in the world who are finding 
out interesting and valuable things for the 
world's happiness and the world's work. If 



198 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

that peep behind the curtain is gained in child- 
hood, by just so much earlier is the happiness 
of knowledge-getting and knowledge-giving 
begun and a career of delight is entered upon 
which no loss of the things which the world com- 
monly finds delight in, can possibly disturb 
or diminish. It brings into common life and 
annexes as a permanent resource for daily use 
an asset which is among the most valuable as 
it is altogether the most enduring. It creates 
companionships, lofty, inspiring and satisfy- 
ing. It induces emotions as varied as the skill 
of the human mind to delineate and express. 
It arouses and stimulates interests which last 
as long as life lasts. The intellect of child- 
hood is fitted by nature to begin this process at 
once. It has momentum, the greatest it ever 
acquires in its entire history. It suffers no 
ennui and all its faculties are awake to receive 
what is offered. Happy indeed the childhood, 
which, when that appetite awakens, is fed 
upon the great things of life and brought at 
once into contact and acquaintance with the 
great minds of the race. It means that the 
pleasure motive in life, of a kind and quality 
which, other things being equal, rarely does 
harm and always does good to the soul, 
is harnessed to the work of life and pulls 
him who has it over many a hard place and 



THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 199 

makes many an arid spot in the human strug- 
gle blossom and bloom like the rose. This 
phase of education has been too little dwelt 
upon and in fact has in many cases been elim- 
inated from the thought of education. Edu- 
cation, properly speaking, is work. It is and 
should be hard work, effort to the limit of 
capability always. But it is work, allied to 
delights, properly conceived, which rob the 
name of its terrors and which offer at every 
turn new scenes to charm the intellectual vision 
and fresh vistas to lure the inquirer into choice 
spots in the great world of knowledge. 

It is among the finest attainments of man- 
kind when they achieve that balance of emo- 
tion and intellect which keeps them serene and 
strong and undisturbed by the vicissitudes of 
life which few human beings in this world 
ever altogether escape. To see a man serene 
and self-contained under great pressure, 
whether it arises from business, from private 
trials or personal sorrows, griefs or misfor- 
tunes, is to see the greatest triumph of the will 
that is possible. This is the proof and sub- 
stantially the only proof that man is superior 
to the beasts and to things. The instrument 
that gives it in its finest form is religion, of 
course. But next to religion, immediately 
after the consciousness of the supreme order 



200 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

of the world and the government of God, is 
the full mind, conscious that the worst aberra- 
tion of fortune is not the major fact in life 
nor even the important fact of the immediate 
situation out of which it arises. Knowledge 
of the laws of nature, ability to discern even 
ever so dimfy the varieties of forces at work 
in the world, and certainty that in the darkest 
moment there is sunlight somewhere, steadies 
the mind and uplifts the heart because it is 
based not on some blind hocus-pocus, hastily 
summoned and repeatedly muttered to obfus- 
cate the already confused mind and make it 
forget the present need, but on wide knowl- 
edge of men, literature, science, art, nature, 
and of itself supreme over all and producer 
of them all. To feel the kinship which the 
awakened and trained mind feels with all the 
great intellectual producers of the world is to 
guarantee serenity and strength for every 
possibility of life. This fact at once and au- 
tomatically releases the mind from many 
anxieties and it can, therefore, without fear 
and without stint, take in, as it develops, the 
pleasures of each condition and can drink to 
the full of the springs of delight which abun- 
dant knowledge opens. 

When shall these springs be opened? 
After ten or a dozen valuable years have been 



THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 201 

lost, when the mental edges have already been 
dulled, when coarse and ugly things have al- 
ready integrated themselves into the juvenile 
intellect and, weed-wise, sought the best places 
and fixed their tenacious grip on most fertile 
spots? Shall we wait till mature life has 
sown the seeds of self -distrust and doubt, 
made suspicion a habit and organized the an- 
tagonisms of the mind behind which lurk ene- 
mies, real and imaginary, to be overcome at 
every turn? Or, when the unclouded intelli- 
gence first looks out on the world, surrounded 
only by aff ection and unconscious of the great 
issues to be fought, and steadily strengthened 
by supervision, by instruction, by the ever- 
widening circle of information, by self -equip- 
ment through organization of the mind, till, 
when it breaks forth into the world, its 
strength is as the strength of ten not only be- 
cause its heart but its mind is also pure? Hap- 
piness in life comes thus almost necessarily 
because the feelings, the judgments, the ob- 
ligations of life combine to secure adherence 
to fundamental law, and in these, happiness 
is secure. There ought to be no question as 
to which answer should be given to these inter- 
rogatories. Speculatively, most people give 
only one answer. Open the mind of youth to 
the best, they say, promptly and with no hesi- 



202 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

tation at all. But who shall do it? Who will 
take from the moments of self-indulgence a 
few, to give them to the work of thus enrich- 
ing the child by his side? Who will make the 
child the first and supremest interest and so- 
cial enjoyment, travel, amusements and all 
that these imply secondary? That is the 
great question! No school can do what the 
school in the home can do and ought to do. 
No teacher can do what the parent can do and 
ought to do. No educational establishment 
can possibly achieve that first and greatest 
success for education, which is won in the 
home, where the first things are kept first and 
where lofty and beautiful ideals crystallized in 
the memorials of knowledge through the works 
of the intellectual leaders of the race, are 
among the earliest associations of the child 
mind. 

It is here that the great battle is really 
fought and is fought usually not by the child 
but by him or her who is the child's sponsor. 
Life being what it is, one cannot do every- 
thing and its disposition becomes simply a 
question of what one desires most. Hav- 
ing settled that, it becomes a question of 
character, of resolution and devotion. The 
end seems so distant and at times it 
does have the appearance of projecting into 



THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 203 

the young life things and matters which seem 
remote from its natural interests. Why 
should my little nine-year-old be told all about 
the struggle concerning the House of Lords, 
its entire history carefully rolled out before 
him, its great names identified, its place in 
English history illustrated and recounted in 
forty different forms and methods to give him 
a vivid picture of what the present political 
revolution in England really means? Is that 
matter for a child? Why not let him have 
the exhilaration of simply wasting his emo- 
tions on the momentous question whether the 
"Tigers" or the "Athletics" will win? Sim- 
ply because I choose the remoter pleasure, 
leaving aside for the moment all else, that 
when he is twenty-five or possibly less, and, in 
the revolutionary progress of history, the 
House of Lords will be in English life what 
a horse car is in the streets of a modern city, 
if it is there at all, he will have among the per- 
manent furnishings of his mind the events 
which have made history and life for him what 
it then will be and have them stored up for the 
many varied uses. That information will be 
habited in his mind which others will labori- 
ously seek out in books and libraries. But 
above and beyond all these, he will have the 
pleasure of recalling that this history is also 



204, THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

allied to his home, to his child life, to the dear- 
est and best associations which this world 
brings, and will, when that subject is men- 
tioned (as will be true of many hundreds and 
perhaps thousands of other themes) , give him 
the pleasure of seeing in his mind's eye his 
childhood home and the faces of those whom 
he has loved long since and lost awhile. Is 
there anything more alluring than this? Is 
there a more beautiful and worthy task to ex- 
alt the parental mind or charge the parental 
heart with zeal and patience? 

Thus there is established a reciprocal intel- 
lectual relation which is pleasurable beyond 
anything else in lif e. In extent, there is noth- 
ing which matches it whatsoever. It not only 
fills this life but it reaches far beyond. Many 
persons whose intellectual traditions reach 
beyond a single generation can readily recall 
things which came to them from the elder day 
by inheritance, so to speak, which merely 
means that they had been inculcated naturally 
and formed the mind stuff of daily existence 
and thought. When new letters or memo- 
rials of such elders are unearthed and when 
the treasures of memory are unlocked and one 
sees the power of the continuous stream of 
knowledge-loving people, not necessarily pro- 
fessionally engaged in the so-called intellect- 



THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 205 

ual callings (all callings are becoming intellect- 
ualized and even the industrial race is to the 
trained mind now already won), there is the 
peculiar pleasure of being in the stream of 
that life and the natural representative of cer- 
tain things which have come down from other 
days. Sometimes the profession is handed 
down from father to son for generations in 
this way. Sometimes certain responsibilities, 
civic, philanthropic and otherwise, are handed 
along from one generation to another, and the 
public expectation demands, as the natural 
responsibility creates, definite attitudes and 
services to the community. In the older por- 
tions of America even already there are fam- 
ilies of whom the communities in which they 
live expect certain kinds of things and are 
disappointed, shocked or grieved, as the case 
may be, if the desired result is not forthcom- 
ing. This is the kind of hereditary succession 
which we need in a democracy if we are not 
to have eternally a raw community alert in- 
deed and intensely self-conscious and vital in 
power and deed, without doubt, but essentially 
unlovely and having at its base, heartache and 
barrenness. Americans especially need to 
think about these things and, if they have even 
the slightest experience of the pleasure which 
is created in having this view firmly before 



206 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

the mind and in accordance with it, set out to 
make the next generation what they wish their 
own might have been, the onward march to- 
ward perfection is begun. 

But the strategic point for this larger re- 
sult, as for the individual perfecting, lies in 
the mind of the child. It seems to be reason- 
ably well settled that the struggle for exist- 
ence will steadily grow harder and also the 
contests of the future, though the competi- 
tions in some directions will undoubtedly be 
lessened, in others they will be highly intensi- 
fied. Once in the struggle, there is little hope 
that men will take time for this kind of cul- 
ture and the kind of life which such culture 
requires. The ideas and the ideals must be 
firmly planted in the heart and thought of 
youth. And this youth must be early youth, 
for here again the economic tension is more 
and more invading the years of youth and 
hastening the thousands of our children out 
into the world with only the equipment which 
they get in childhood and sometimes hardly 
that. That, at least, should be made as rich 
and fertile as it is possible to make it. This 
subject is too vast even to hint at in this place, 
but it is broached merely for the purpose of 
mentioning again that no struggle is severe 
if there is pleasure mixed up with it, and en- 



THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 207 

durance is vastly extended and interest quick- 
ened and every power heightened if there goes 
with it the sense of delight and inward satis- 
faction. The earlier that fact is mastered, 
the earlier the whole view of life is altered and 
the sooner rational living begins. It does not 
need a very reflective man, seeing the feverish 
way in which the mass of men hurry to and 
fro to get what they call pleasure or relaxa- 
tion from the struggles of their daily life, to 
realize that these people are not only not get- 
ting what they are seeking but are wasting 
valuable powers and corrupting and degrad- 
ing life while seeking recreation. One does 
not have to be a seer, sitting in a street car and 
looking into the worried faces of men and 
women, to know that most of these people 
have no real peace of mind and not many re- 
sources which make for serenity within or joy 
in the work of life. It is easy to see that in 
many of these people imagination has utterly 
perished. They are simply the pawns worked 
by other men of power and imagination who 
have brought their minds into a high state of 
efficiency and effective reaching after the re- 
sult they seek. It is easy to see that the ca- 
pacity for real and recreative pleasure even, in 
many cases has disappeared. 

The joy of life springs from the sources 



208 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

of joy and is not pumped into life by buying 
admission to a place labeled amusement, just 
as education is not to be secured necessarily 
at a place called a college. Joy comes from 
real alignment with the things that make for 
security, contentment and peace. Funda- 
mentally these qualities are moral, but though 
the nature of them is moral, their strength or 
weakness and their sterility or fertility depend 
upon the mental furnishings with which they 
are buttressed about. Deep down at the 
sources of life, before birth in many cases, but 
at birth and immediately thereafter, certainly 
are the foundations of life to be laid. And 
the spirit in which they are laid must be that 
which contemplates a result so sublime that all 
the imaginative powers are stirred to their ut- 
most to make them secure and strong and capa- 
ble of upholding the greatest superstructure 
that can possibly be laid upon them. Who 
can know but this small creature whom you 
can hold almost in the palm of your hand will 
one day be the pivot upon which some vast 
and mighty human interest will revolve? It 
is no impertinence for any mother to think 
this possible! History, if it teaches anything, 
teaches that the obscure and unknown great 
outnumber the known and magnified great by 
many millions. I think often of the obscure 



THE PLEASURES OF THE MIND 209 

and unknown man of whom we are told in the 
New Testament, who held the rope that held 
the basket by which St. Paul was let down 
outside the city walls, escaping with his life 
and thus saving to the world that marvelous 
mind and activity with all its subsequent re- 
sult in the history of the world ! But upon so 
slight a thing may rest so vast a result! The 
importance and supremacy of the individual 
will never be reduced however society devel- 
ops. To take a large and comprehensive view 
of the possibilities of life for the humblest child 
is not only not presumption but is the only 
true view at least for the parents who brought 
it into the world. In the home school will its 
earliest and its most effective lessons be 
taught. In the home school will its first and 
substantial ethical outlook upon life be de- 
veloped. In the home school will the perma- 
nent joys of life and the springs thereof be 
opened and the seat of the abiding pleasures 
of life be uncovered. But these springs are 
within, and they are found only by the pa- 
tient, persistent and intensive utilization of 
the earliest moments of life. "Vergiss' 
nicht am Morgen die Lampen zu sorgen," is 
one of the maxims the little German girls are 
taught. "Forget not in the morning to trim 
the lamps," is the housewifely instruction to 



210 THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME 

the becoming home-makers. Let us not for- 
get that this homely maxim has a larger mean- 
ing. Forget not in the Morning to trim the 
Lamp of Life, and at Evening Time there 
shall be Light! 



THE END 



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